ASCII by Jason Scott

Blockparty Preparations

One of my speakers (which I will not name), essentially agreed to Blockparty but didn't, you know, totally go crazy studying what the heck it is. I was offering a flight and hotel and a chance to visit some old friends in the area, so they were all for coming. But after browsing the schedule and events at this combined conference/demoparty, this week I got what was essentially a "Hell yeah, this thing is gonna be good."

There's no easy way to solve this problem; a lot of people who would really enjoy this event I'm helping to put on will never hear of it. A demoparty is one of those things which a person doesn't just sit down one day and look for, i.e. "I wonder if there's any demo parties in the area" or "Hmm, I have this demo sitting around and nowhere to submit it; I'll check the usual places.". Some folks don't even know what this event is at all and would have to be severely assaulted to get them to look at all the great things happening with it. This is how the world works, and there's little to do about it without becoming a loud-mouthed, inappropriately-shouting-things advertising dumbass. So nope, the tragedy will continue.

I leave for Cleveland tomorrow (April 2nd) and between now and then there's a lot of gathering, collecting, planning and last-minute calls to be made. It's going to be quite the event and I'll be spending a lot of time and money between now and then on it. It'll all be worth it, too.

To the people who, in late April or May, will hear this went on... sorry, man. Maybe next year.

To the people who just heard of it before it happened... drop everything. You have new plans.

Luna City

After spending many hours scanning at Steve Meretzky's, house, I got a small amount of sleep and hopped a flight down to Washington, DC to drive over to Peter Hirschberg's Luna City Arcade. I've gushed about this place quite a bit, and the family that is willing to open their home to complete strangers on a regular basis to enjoy a mortgage-swelling personal project that has inspired many.

The impetus for this particular event was a visit from an NPR reporter, and sadly, I didn't get the chance to be there before the reporter left. I had many things in mind to tell that NPR reporter, things which I had hoped to get into the final story. I know how these things go, so the chances of this were not so great. So I guess I'll just have to tell you in here.

What I wanted to stress was the style inherent in how Peter' s gone about his creations; how his Vector Dreams emulator was an attempt to not just emulate the gameplay and program, but the actual behavior of a vector machine, the sounds that came with it beyond just the stuff on the circuit board, and the variations in the machine that would mean the difference between an echo for someone looking back and an intense memory. I wanted to tell the reporter how much this guy sank into this project, and to then turn around and not charge one thin dime for its use for people, how wonderful that is. A lot of people have private arcades or game rooms; Peter built a living shrine, a temple of video arcades, and invites the world to come by and pay respects. That's special.

I played a number of games (Q*Bert and I like each other) and twirled some knobs, but I mostly like walking around soaking up the ambiance of the place while dozens of people are milling around. It feels so right, in there. (The windows are all blacked over, giving the impression of a late summer night and trying to get those last few games in before you have to go back home.) A choice phrase I overheard, multiple times, was "Wow, this is so much better than the emulator." The emulator brings the core functionality of the arcade game into a realm of ease and accessibility that is hard to overcome, but it has to do so at a great sacrifice of environment. Even a custom cabinet running an emulator has a lot of potential to miss both the intensity of a dedicated game (especially with custom controls), and the better-than-the-sum feeling from standing near a row of such games. Obviously it's not realistic for every person who desires the feel for the old arcades to have one in their homes, which makes a place like this that much more special.

After taking a few shots of the place, I went upstairs where he had snacks and chairs, and hung around talking with folks. Peter and I made the acquaintance of a set of people stopping by to congratulate the Hirschbergs on having such an incredible place. This is the payment they choose to get over turning this into a profit-garnering concern; you play all the games for free, games that in some cases predate the people playing them, and then you stop by the thank them for the opportunity. A lot of people did just that.

It was an excellent trip.

Scanning Infocom

Saturday put me in Steve Meretzky's basement. There are worse places to be than Steve Meretzky's basement.

As part of the GET LAMP project, I've been collecting artifacts and images throughout the commercial heydays of text adventures, and nobody got bigger than Infocom in the early 1980s. And Steve was one of the big designers at Infocom, creating or co-creating some of the most lasting games in the genre: Planetfall, Sorcerer, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall... and then went on after Infocom to make many other classics as well. He is a towering figure in the games industry, recognized as one of the greats, among other designers who have produced one-tenth his output.

But beyond his place in the history of text adventures, he's also acutely aware of the history of text adventures, and the process, and the trends of a gaming industry. Unlike a lot (and I do mean the vast majority) of commercial text adventure authors, he's still in the game-making business; a lot moved into other programming jobs, or contract work, or basically stepping upwards into management of other programmers. (A few walked away from computers as a livelihood, too.)

But even beyond that, beyond the fact that he was this great designer and also associated with this great company and has been a willing participant in recounting the history of this genre, is the fact that he's been a tireless archivist of all the history he's walked through or been a part of.

This can't be trumpeted enough: Steve saved everything.

He's let me go through a lot of what he saved, to scan parts of it for use in my movie. And there was a lot to go through.

He followed one of the core tenets of archiving: save everything you can, because you never know what will end up being the most important items in the regard of history. He saved memos, handwritten notes, ad copy, correspondence with printers and PR folk. He saved invitations to parties, softball game announcements, photos and sketches.

This is also critical: it's sorted. He didn't sort it to the level of fanaticism that would require someone to only keep a subset of stuff, but he has it in arrangements that made my life a lot easier: memos by years, folders for sales, folders for drawings, and game design binders. Did I mention the game design binders? Every scrap of paper related to the design of his games, thousands of pages of revision, discussion, improvements, dead ends and so on.

He also had a really nice copy of Cornerstone, the ultimately-failed Infocom business product:

I can't imagine there are that many pristine copies of this product left; that one of them would be in the collection of someone whose company partially failed because of this product shows his stellar attitude to saving the artifacts.

I wish more people who worked in firms of great fame or whose company has or had great influence in the minds of the world would be like this. While for many it might not be informative to browse over the castoffs of a commercial enterprise, for others it's a perfect insight into what came before. Infocom had to pioneer many now-common ideas in marketing, production and programming approach; the academics that started the company threw a lot of very interesting incubated ideas into the mix and I personally believe that's what led to its initial success. Beyond that, though, you can't discount the work of their creative teams to turn very good game ideas into must-have classics.

I must state clearly that not every step of Infocom was a sure-footed midas touch, and not every choice made came back a hundred-fold in riches. Contained in these documents are silly demands, poorly-considered options, badly-handled maneuvers, and the failings of people all too human.

These are not items saved to trot out at every gathering of folks to self-aggrandize. They aren't trumpeted in every piece of post-1990 correspondence to win arguments by fiat. This is a collection of influential writings and behind the scenes artifacts that a serious student of games and self-proposed archive of gaming materials would have to acknowledge as a world-class library. We are all very lucky that Steve had the forward-thinking approach to his work to keep such a tight record of the last few decades of his productive life. We will all be better for it.

How lucky I was to have contact with Steve Meretzky. How lucky we all are!

DVDs for the Blind

It almost sounds like a joke, doesn't it. DVDs for the blind. What are the blind watching DVDs for. There's nothing to watch, really. Go listen to an audiobook or something, blind people.

Well, you might be surprised to hear that the blind do buy DVDs, and play them, and enjoy the movies. Not all of them, but not everybody watches DVDs at all, so this isn't surprising. In another useful bit of evidence on the side of the anti Digital Rights Management crowd, the blind often end up having to rip the DVDs and extract the various titles/parts out of the DVD so they can play stuff without being hung up on menus and special features and easter eggs and the rest. They turn a DVD into a series of audio tracks in a playlist and go through those, basically.

A number of the interviewees of GET LAMP are blind. Just like the BBS Documentary put me in the homes of midwesterners for the first time, so has GET LAMP caused me to spend time with blind people for extended periods, in real conversation. One thing I learned was that blind is relative; a number of my blind interviewees can see, just not very well at all; one was born with no lenses on her eye. One is aware of some aspect of light, but it's absolutely an abstract hue. And so on.

Another thing I learned (or re-learned) is how flexible the human mind is; it will try to place items even though one might think it wouldn't have any context. "Flame" means one thing, "mountain range" another, and interviewees mentioned how much text adventures expanded their knowledge of the world because you could "walk" among places with no guidance and all the salient features explained to you, right there. One mentioned how he didn't understand how big an ocean liner was until he played a game that took place on one, and so on. Another was very sad for sighted people because of all the years we've watched television at 720x540 resolution. That's so sad! His resolution is infinite.

As I interviewed someone who was deaf for my previous film and resolved then and there they should enjoy it like everyone else, so too does the interviewing of several blind subjects mean that I want them to enjoy the DVD as well. Hence, a blind-accessible DVD.

As opposed to my militancy regarding subtitles, I realize that I'm much further out on the edge with wanting to make a DVD blind or visually-impaired accessible. There's just not a metric ton of these things.

I found a DVD that claims to be the first blind accessible DVD, with menus and the rest. That's true, as long as you know what submenu to magically navigate to to turn it on. As my friend Andy loves to say, FAIL.

What is likely to happen with my DVDs is that when you put them in, it acts like any other DVD, but the first selection is an introduction to the disc, which says, out loud, what to hit to start audio menus. From there, we can have a bunch of other features, but then both "types" (blind and not blind) are happy. I hope. It's the wheelchair ramp problem; functionality vs. aesthetics. I've seen it done right and wrong.

This means the episodes or films on this set will have descriptive video. Experiments are underway for that. It also means that everything gets descriptive video. This delays the project, or more accurately, the project takes the right amount of time to do this properly.

If you're feeling cynical, you can also tell me how brilliant I am to market to the blind; the blind, after all, often were big customers of text adventures because these were games that were basically complete and total when read to you. You could play them in audio and get the same experience as others. And they were easy to hack into screen readers, since they always wrote to text rendering instead of doing graphics or whatever else your system used. So these were very popular so hooray, more potential customers. If it's not obvious, this isn't my main motivating factor, otherwise I'd "spice up" the whole movie with stuff that might, somewhere, appeal to a general audience even if it didn't have anything to do with text adventures. Where does that crap end, anyway.

As I work this point, it also means I look at my editing in a different way; when you know your work has to be portrayed as much as it's shown, you really want to smooth the thing out to the best quality. If I'm going to spend an extra week recording descriptive video, then it should be something worth describing.

We live in this great modern age, where machines can do an awful lot for everyone to enjoy content like never before. I hope this DVD set will be a favorite for blind viewers for a long time to come.

Help Me Find Invisiclues 2000

I'll give you what I'm doing, what I have, what I want.

I'd like to add a level of Invisiclues to the packaging for one of the versions of GET LAMP. Let me explain what invisiclues are in this context. They're a method of printing in "invisible ink", such that you can't see the printing on paper until you take a marker, which has a different chemical on it, and rub it on the paper, causing the printing to turn opaque. It's very neat to watch. It appeals heavily to children.

The massive giant in this field/approach currently is Lee Publications, who make a mass of products that utilize this invisible ink technology. I do not really see a way to hire them to make booklets and there's no indication of if there's some other printer they use to make this stuff (i.e. someone I could contract for a few thousand booklets).

Way back when, Mike Dornbrook and the folks of Infocom's marketing department had to go around searching wildly until someone let them know they wanted "Latent Image" printing. Then it apparently fell into place. A citation because citations are awesome:

He was getting quite bored explaining what to do about the Thief, and giving the answer to the riddle. He wanted to do hint booklets if only he could find a way which would be easy to use without spoiling any part of the games for anyone. After months of searching for a solution, he came across an invisible printing process and InvisiClues were born.

An additional one:

At a party, a friend suggested using invisible ink, which could be made visible by running a special developing pen over the hidden answers. Mike loved the idea and immediately tried to get started on it - only to find a major obstacle in his path: Where to find a company to produce the books? It turned out there are only two manufacturers in the U.S. capable of printing up "latent image process" books, a fact Mike discovered after exercising the same sort of perseverance that helps him solve adventure games. Luckily, one of the printers was nearby.

This is less an easy process in the modern era because a lot of things call themselves latent image printing.

Good luck with the term "invisible ink", too: I find way too many places sell ink pens that work under blacklight, like this one. Cool, but not what I want.

I am sure it will be a process of finding "the printer" who almost never deals with end-user customers, who has this buried in their catalog, which almost nobody uses but which I will produce a sizeable order for.

If you find this, you will get a credit in the movie.

Go.

Ding Dong, ANSI Calling

I had the pleasure of attending the ANSI Gallery showing this past January, and I also had the chance to purchase one of the items being shown; one of the small handful of ANSI display boxes against the wall.

Today, the box with the ANSI displayer arrived.

No complaints here! I'm glad to be the owner of one of these little pieces of history.

These are customized boxes with circuits designed to show off a specific ANSI artwork, scrolling it slowly on a VGA-connected monitor. They were all hand-assembled, of course, polished, and cobbled together in time for the very successful gallery opening, which then lasted about a month. It was heavily, heavily attended.

I believe this is the first time I ever bought something hanging on the wall of an art gallery, with the little red pin next to the price and everything. I paid $200, in case you are of the vulgar sort.

Into the archives!

Trixter's Monotonous Triumph

Trixter, that master of the truly old school IBM PC programming, has done it again. Already world-famous for his 8088 Corruption demo that put a type of full-motion video on an original IBM PC, has begun work on a music program. Big deal, your jaded mouth forms, but hear me out. He has made a music program that works with an IBM PC speaker.

The program is called MONOTONE, and after months of working, Trixter has finally come out with an alpha capable of both allowing input of music and playing it on the simple little barely-the-size-of-a-quarter PC internal speaker. Here's his weblog entry on this marvel.

He's begun making video entries about his work, so feel free to skip right here to his impressive demonstration of his little project:

In case you don't have the time to listen to his presentation, be assured; he has written a music program for some of the most obscure objects sold to generate sound in the last 20 years. The Bank Street Music Card, for example, may not actually exist in anywhere but dreams at this point. The whole work is object-oriented, meaning he can add and remove modules within it as needed. He has set it up, in other words, to be an utterly flexible, utterly expandable work, while working on some of the simplest hardware from the dawn of the personal computer era. To prove his work, he shows a winning work from Blockparty last year and renders it on his program. And you can hear it.

MONOTONE is going to be amazing. How lucky we are to have people like Trixter working so hard to give old machinery new life.

The Three Levels

The longer I do stuff of a historical nature with computers, the more this puts me, ironically, in contact with people. And the more you end up in contact with people, the more you learn about people. The problem is, what if you don't like what you learn?

I had an absolutely horrible English class with a teacher who had nothing but contempt for students. Her tirades drove me into books to read during class, and it was by luck that I found the story "The Bet" by Anton Chekhov. It's over here and you might recognize it, or not. The upshot is that a young lawyer spends a lot of time learning about people and the more he does the less happy he is, until he renounces the bet he is involved in just to be rid of it.

This story was striking to me because at 13 I didn't have any idea that increased knowledge could cause unhappiness; I was surrounded by so many people who were fighting to parade their ignorance that I assumed that in learning (as opposed to rote memorization) came pleasure, and I had stuck with that. And really, I continue to stick to that.

But age brings nuance and not everything ends up staying black and white, clean or dirty, all or none. For most of my young life I knew, just knew, that in any situation involving medical condition, that if there was a way for me to be kept alive, any means necessary, I would take it because of the utter void I knew awaited extinguishing. Now, I realize that there are conditions in which, ultimately, a lot of the reason for continued existence can be counterbalanced.

Anyway.

So after conducting hundreds of interviews, and in some cases spending months tracking down a story, I have this rough idea about reality in my head. I call it the three levels. It's actually four, but I'll explain that in a moment.

The first level is the "official story". This is the story that people who do not care about history specifically usually have. George Washington was the first American president. The earth is round. Alexander Graham Bell discovered/invented the telephone, as did Edison the light bulb. There was a cold war and the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of it. The stories on this level are generally in the ballpark. If your job is not directly affected by knowing exactly who is Queen of England or how many city-states are in Asia, then you are a content little donut with the first level.

The second level is the "actual story". This is not the actual story per se, but the story that is told to people who care a little more than those who know the first level. Typewriters certainly jammed, but the introduction of the standard qwerty keyboard over the previous formats is not necessarily because they jammed. The great videogame crash was certainly because of a glut of games, but also because of changes in the economy and investment. It is possible to read the output of wireless keyboards and decode them but why would anyone be doing that to you right now.

The third level is the objective observation, away from the writings and the witnesses and the stories and the lore. It's what you get if you have a camera running on the situation or record things on tape, without going inside anyone's head. This level has come more and more into prominence as of late. Don't tase me, bro.

The fourth level, which I said sort of doesn't exist, is the level you would get if you actually aimed the camera in the right direction and the camera was capable of recording thoughts, motivations, and situations from the past. With this magical camera, you'd really know what was up. We don't have one of these cameras, although sometimes people will write books as if they have them, which really tends to piss the subjects of the books off.

So many times, I've encountered the first level during interviews. Occasionally the second. As rare as anything is the third. I never get the fourth.

Much of the discussion in web forums rests around the second level. We, the discussion group, know just enough to feel we're worth debating it beyond the usual rubes. We can infer and bring together facts and cite sources and generally pontificate. Sometimes this is entertaining and sometimes it's an explosion. But rarely, really, can you ever know what's what. It comes down to who wins the debate, the argument, seems the least like a dick, and perseveres through the alternate opinions or contrarian onslaught.

The proliferation of multi-media availability means that more and more we face our actual selves recorded, doing what we did, with no real recourse for saying we didn't do it or this was the way it really happened. Talented people are of course always working to say "it's not what it looks like" but it certainly looks like it.

These three layers are in conflict with each other. You can shout until you're blue in the face that the first level opinion is wrong, but you're often countering it with your second level opinion, and you're wrong too, buddy. Nobody, maybe not even the people involved, know of the full levels three and four. Maybe they do and choose to ignore it over time. The mind's an amazing thing. It changes stuff. I've seen myself do it, I've seen others do it. Mid-interview. Mid-statement.

We spend so much time arguing, making our point, saying that we know the real story. My opinion, many interviews conducted later and much observation of writing later, is we find ourselves one level further than we'd like.

The Tyranny of the Ratio

Not every part of history is bright and cheerful, and some concepts which we think we've grown past are certainly still with us to the present day. In these cases, historical knowledge of the situation is even more disheartening than none at all. Nothing's worse than knowing we've encountered a problem before, have dealt with the problem, and now the problem has optimized and made itself even more insidious and evil the next time around.

Many situations fall under this general description, but I speak today of the Ratio.

The Ratio in the BBS world was a symptom of the natural supply/demand balance, twisted to cover an economy where nothing had specific monetary value. On BBSes, the two most precious commodities meted out to users were connection time and access to files. The most precious commodity meted from users to the BBSes were message posts and uploads.

Each side of the battle, for it became a battle, fought to get what they wanted from the other side. To be sure, there were users who loved nothing more than uploading and posting, and you had definitely had sysops which adored providing lots of files to download and leaving the time to "unlimited". But the vast majority swung the other way. Coming on, not posting, then downloading umpteen programs and disconnecting made you some sort of miscreant, an unwelcome cat thief in the home the sysop had set up. Conversely, the sysop who disallowed multiple downloads, who harangued and demanded his users post, was essentially a petty tyrant of a very, very small empire.

The ratio rose out of this, a solution which allowed the code to automatically determine who was welcome and who was not. It allowed the sysop to dictate how many files could be downloaded before the users had to upload. How many calls come come and go, scott free, before the non-communicative user had to post something, anything, in the message bases.

While the users could be laid some blame for not participating in the BBS's life blood, its message bases and file areas, the resultant sense of force and brutal numbers that followed the institution of a ratio did little to bring warmth and truth to that board. The inherent flaw with this is that it's a programming solution to a human problem. If you have to create a set of rules that represent an "ideal user" and then try to shoehorn all your people into it, you will end up alienating a lot of people you didn't intend to, and keeping people you don't want: folks so desperate for certain files, they'll just hop through any amount of hoops to get them.

Exploring this concept further, I contend these approaches partially come with the heady rush of being a proprietor, of running a sort of concern or business with actual customers/users, even if they're not specifically paying you with money. You're in charge, you make the rules, you decide what's what. It's in that seat of power that you can bring your board to a new level, or crush it into a fascist ghost town. And if people, your people, start taking advantage of what you consider to be your good graces, then you end up instituting rules to keep them in line.

Nothing is more unreadable than a message posted under duress, an attempt to fulfil a ratio requirement and get back to downloading files. You're shoved against the microphone, told to be witty, and only then will you get the meal you were promised. The short run seems to be what you wanted: a flood of messages. The long run reveals what you really got: a flood of crap.

I know all this because I've been at both ends of the situation. I have fought the leech and I have been the leech. I can defend both.

There is something magical in finding not just the tiny sliver of something you were looking for, but to find it couched in a complete collection, placed among all its brethren, with context and layout and the assurance that you're looking at a pristine capture of it in its original state. It is natural to want all of this collection together, as you found it, ready to be held and treasured locally. You reach for the one file you can download, but the rest are held from you, deeper in the cell, and no amount of pressing against the bars will give it to you. It is a terrible feeling, and it is still happening.

Also, too, there is nothing worse than finding out that the number of calls to your BBS overnight were less than 3, because someone called again and again and pulled everything you had.

Even as we grow fat with additional resources of many times, richness where there once was poverty, we find new things we need to regulate, things that cost us dearly if given out freely. And then, once again, the ratio rears its head.

I have no solution, but the tenacity of the problem and how it has stayed in strong play to the modern day haunts me.

Awesome Trailer Review!!

Yes, it's real.

Hi Jason,
This looks well shot and edited.  I can tell you really care for the
people and their stories; it comes through in the way they address the
camera.
My only suggestion is that you might want to ease up on the dramatic
piano and slow-motion.  The tone you seem to be cultivating is pretty
similar to "King of Kong"--which is great; that was one of my favorite
films from last year.  But the thing about "King of Kong" is that the
director just let the people tell their own stories, and never tried
to wring any emotion out of their expressions or words that wasn't
truly there in that moment.  In my opinion, that's the role of a
documentarian: to make the feelings of the subjects in each moment as
clear as possible--nothing more, nothing less.  Keep the genuine
interaction (and add music where it's appropriate, of course), but
ditch the theatrics; that's my two cents.
I do understand, however, that this was a trailer, not the finished
film, and my overall impression is immensely positive.  I can't wait
to see the final cut.  I've been interested in this project since I
first read of it, and it's a thrill to finally see it coming together.

Keep them coming!

GET LAMP Trailer Out

The next GET LAMP trailer is now out.

To get to the page with all the various versions of this trailer, just go to this page. It's not linked from the main page yet, but will be. Until then, feel special and exclusive. There's a good set of variant renders of this trailer, but be assured it's all the same content.

I even have Flash and Youtube versions, and in the case of the YouTube one I use my new best friend Format 18 so that it looks pretty darn crisp and clean. I can almost forgive the tiny resolution when it's rendered in this higher quality.

I call this the March 2008 trailer. Whereas the previous teaser trailer had almost no information, this one has slightly more, and a trailer that will likely come out within a week or two of the final release will have even more.

I hate when stuff can't stand on their own and needs to be "introduced" by the creator, so I won't discuss the content of the trailer here. I just ask you to check it out if you're so inclined. I hope you enjoy it. I certainly have enjoyed putting it together.

Now, back to the workbench.

Confessions of a Staff Captain

Some time ago, I mentioned I play Halo 3. I never played Halo or Halo 2, and I just happened to stumble into this thing, and I find it a relaxing side hobby, in between film renders and other stuff that makes me have to take a break for a while. I love logging in, getting into a game, and then hauling ass or having my ass handed back to me.

About 50% of the fun of the game is the game itself, and the rest of it is the social aspects that I like studying. The game has the ability of people all over the world to hear each others' voices and interact quite a bit along the lines of shooting other people in the face, so there's a lot of room for interesting interactions. Some of these are, of course, ugly.

When you play Halo 3, you get two scales of your achievements. One is your experience. The experience comes from playing games, grinding away. As you play more, your experience inevitably goes up. Maybe it's a point a game, maybe a couple points, maybe zero points. But ultimately, it just climbs up, given enough games, regardless of your performance.

The other scale, however, is your skill level. This one's a little stranger. If you win a lot, it goes up, but it doesn't always go up, and sometimes it can go back down again, depending on your performance or your team's performance. It initially goes up very fast (starts at 1, and you can end up with a score of 3-5 very quickly) but as the Skill number climbs, it will eventually sort of plateau out and it's very difficult to go up in skill without just winning and winning, with no lost games.

Eventually, this combination of skill and experience will set your Rank. Your rank starts out at Recruit and goes along about 13 general Rank headings. Each of these Rank headings also have grades. So you can be a Grade 2 Lieutenant or a Grade 3 General, or whatever. More importantly, though, either increases of skill OR experience will increase your Rank. This means that if you play enough, you will gain rank, rising through the various levels as you go. Here's my various ranks I've had.

Eventually, though, pure experience stops being too relevant a metric. You eventually have to raise your Skill level. This level is Captain.

Some time ago, I hit the maximum of what a person can do just through playing. Now, when I play with buddies or whatever, sometimes I win or sometimes I lose, but we have a good time. But since I'm not winning over and over, I am what's called a "Staff Captain", the highest level Captain you can be. It's quite recognizable, with the three gold bars at the bottom.

Thanks for sitting through all this. Now for the interesting situation.

People fucking hate staff captains.

Being a staff captain means you are not a consistently winning player. You have not risen to sufficient skill in any variation of Halo 3, and you are a holding pattern, and therefore unpredictable.

And, with the additional bonus of people seeing Ranks when a group is assembled for a game, the insults come raining down. Nasty, nasty insults.

"Oh fuck, a staff captain. Jesus, why are you even playing this game? What the fuck's wrong with you?"

This does not encourage the nicer aspects of my personality.

The question, of course, is where Bungie is in all of this. What they now have is a system that breeds a level of nastiness far and beyond mere pseudo-jingoistic team puffery. In game after game, I and others with the three gold bars get called all manner of sub-human, targeted and criticized by others, being told that because we haven't taken the steps to specifically win a number of games in a row, we should get the hell out of Halo. Surely they can't be delighted this is happening.

I'm sure there's no way they knew it was going to end up being this way, that how the game was would trap a specific set of folks in a grinding situation with no easy escape, set up to be ridiculed consistently and nastily. I doubt they're proud of it. If they are, they're not the same style of programmers/designers I see in evidence elsewhere in the game, with its attempts to keep games fair, opportunities many, and variety the rule of the day.

How amazing just a few chosen parameters in their work would be the cause of so much ire.

Blockparty: Your Source for Cocaine

Great news, depending on your definition of great.

As we head towards just a couple weeks before Blockparty, I've got the word we've got ourselves a brand new sponsor: Cocaine Energy Drink.

We're being sent hundreds of cans. If you want to try out some Cocaine, Blockparty @ Notacon will be your place to go.

So, how do I reconcile this with my usual dislike of ads?

Mostly, the cocaine story is hilarious. A drink comes out that calls itself "Cocaine". The Food and Drug Administration goes absolutely batshit. They move in and close the production of the drink down. The beverage company, instead of lying down, reads the shutdown notice, modifies the labeling, and comes out with Cocaine again.

Cocaine. It's the pause that refreshes.

Anyway, I appreciate the help. Blockparty costs cash to put on, so why not help people enjoy more hours of it by pumping them full of energy drink? What can possibly go wrong?

If you are still on the fence about attending Blockparty, this is your time to make the right choice. Pre-registration is nearly closed. head over there and get your ticket.

Happy 18th, TinyTIM

John Rescigno and I have no idea when the MUD/MUSH we started, TinyTIM, was actually "started". We were certainly screwing around with the MUD program in late February and early March of 1990. We were both college sophmores (he at Clarkson University and I at Emerson College) and we were abusing an open account on the MIT AI Lab's machine. A few years after we founded it, we decided to make, arbitrarily, March 18th 1990 the official "birthday" of this game.

It's still around, 18 years later. It's been though a half-dozen cities and many machines, and has been a lifetime of experience crushed into a simple C program.

It's still up if you telnet to yay.tim.org port 5440. Someday, I will write about that place and all that happened. Not everyone will be happy when I do. But until that dark day, let's focus on the good parts. So many friendships, so much love, so much greatness out of something that calls itself a game.

Happy Birthday.

Why Hello There

Uncle Kevin wrote another article recently that caught fire, mostly regarding a way of shifting value in an environment where digital duplication is the norm. Like his other article I mentioned, he doesn't get all of it right but he throws into sharp focus for a percentage of the reading public some fundamental facts. I won't sit around and go "I thought of this also", because while I had given this some thought, I certainly don't frame it like he does and people have been faced with this issue for a very long time.

Basically, what do you do when duplication is mostly free or no-cost, and you want to make bank? Well, you find qualities that can't be duplicated easily and sell those.

Uncle Kevin culls out eight of these possible qualities. He calls them Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability. He then proceeds to come up with his own whack-ass definitions of each of these, so the words themselves are not as helpful but again, it's the main thought that counts.

His version of Immediacy (the ability to get the stuff hot off the presses from the content people) is basically what I exploited/used for the BBS Documentary, selling pre-orders by the bucketful and ending up with something like 400-500 DVD sets ready to go out the door as soon as they arrived at my house. In fact, I ended up having to hand assemble these things to get them out quicker. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars of pre-ordering, so I took that stuff seriously. GET LAMP will have pre-ordering as well.

A bunch of his qualities are things most people don't give a crap about; whether it came from the real place, whether it was set up for your specific needs, and so on. I focus more on the mercenary aspects; the BBS Documentary was 19 gigabytes of content. As I pointed out in one of my presentations, if someone is willing (especially in 2005) to duplicate 19 gigabytes of content, there was no way they were going to buy your stupid stuff from you. Chasing after them with a million honking bells and idiot laws is a wild goose chase. Let it go, man.

Anyway, so as I continue to brainstorm similar ideas along Kevin's essay, I've been coming up with a few wild ideas, some which might stick around and some which will not. I am more and more enamored of a tier-based system, with crazy-deluxe on top and crazy-cheap on the bottom. By my very, very rough estimation, about ten times as many people downloaded the BBS Documentary as have bought it. It's easy enough to make something downloadable; the question is what isn't downloadable and people might wish to purchase/acquire?

So here's my current favorite.

As part of buying the ultra-deluxe version, you get an e-mail address and a unique code. Before or after finishing the movie, you send me the code and your phone number and a good time.

And then I call you.

Is this a feature people would want? I don't know. But it's something I can offer as a feature that basically no-one else can. They can offer someone else to call, but not me. So you're basically getting some time with me as part of your package. I know more than once I've seen a film and then tracked down a filmmaker to scream at/cheer at them about what I just saw. There are a percentage of folks who don't need permission to decide to call someone up and rant/rave. But for a lot of folks, they don't feel quite right just calling up. As part of this deluxe package, they most certainly would.

All optional, of course; you don't have to call me, and I would laugh the laugh of a thousand suns if there was some sort of e-bay-like underground of traded Jason Scott Phone Codes from people selling off their unused ones. But for the people who are concerned about the "right" to call me, they would get it.

And no tears, either, a phrase I learned from the book Liar's Poker. That means that if they want to scream at me for 20 minutes, they got the right. If someone wants to take half an hour to grill me on editing choices, so be it. If they want to ask me stupid non-sequitir phrases for a while, fine and fine. It won't bother me; I'm doing a service that I'm selling.

I'm always thinking how to do stuff better or differently; this is just the latest one to kick up. I like it, in theory. How about you?

My New Little Youtube Buddy, Format 18

So some time ago, over a year ago really, it was announced that YouTube, that paragon of unbelievably shitty video and instantaneous access, that delightful example of "if you can't be best be first" and "people will suck down anything if it's free and quick", was going to start improving the quality of the video on their site. Basically, they were going to have alternate higher-quality encodings and go back and make stuff look good, and so on.

Over time, this has trickled in and out of stuff, and I kind of forgot about it for a long while, but let me tell you, it's starting to pay off.

I'm shooting in High Definition. I shot a music video in high-def and a documentary in high-def and let me tell you of the personal pain felt when I go to youtube versions of stuff I shot and it looks like a courtroom sketch artist got drunk and tried to animate my work using crayons. The widescreen gets squashed and the motion looks like poop and the sound is generally OK but only until you notice again how horrible the video is and then you kind of flip to another browser tab to ignore the travesty you're seeing.

It turns out the option for turning on higher quality in a YouTube video is adding a "&fmt=18" at the end of the URL for a YouTube video. This says, basically "please to be not the sucking".

I give you my MC Frontalot Music Video as a clear example:

BEFORE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

AFTER:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE&fmt=18

The differences are obvious and intense: better motion, use of widescreen, sharper images. Obviously it helps if the source video is not sucktastic, and in this case I know it's not sucktastic. I do believe I will never link to a youtube video without &fmt=18 attached to the end ever again.

It's nice when, in a rare display of the world working out, the dominant crappy thing becomes optionally less crappy.

Bow Down Before the Files You Serve

It's been quite a watershed year for people putting their stuff where their mouths are, or at least where the mouths of "copyfighters" have been.

A number of interesting events happened, but none so easily recognizable as the release of the new Nine Inch Nails album, Ghosts I-IV. It's one thing when a band you know is obscure is doing something risky/weird, and it's a whole other bag of beans when a really famous band/individual that has always been into a non-silent position on the business side of music steps up to the plate and lets go.

And Nine Inch Nails is pretty damned famous. Either as the "band" or as Trent Reznor, chances are the kids and the not-so-kids and a lot of adults have heard this guy. He gets played on radio a lot, is known for all sorts of crazy great stuff, and qualifies as a celebrity. He fills stadiums, one of which had me in it. He's the man.

So this year, he announces he has a new album, and he's going to release it Creative Commons, and he's going to make it downloadable, and he's going to sell it online, and he's going to do a bunch of other stuff. That is big news. That's not some band featuring four guys who nominally like each other who rip off Tool telling you you can get a .mp3 off their site; this is a kick-ass actual experiment.

So one day the site went up and there was a place to order this new album and a whole bunch of ways to download it and acquire it.

The short result is this thing has sold very well. This has been Trent's official word on it so far: "First of all, a sincere THANK YOU for the response to Ghosts. We are all amazed at the reaction for what we assumed would be a quiet curiosity in the NIN catalog. My faith in all of you has been restored - let's all go have coffee somewhere (my treat)!"

There's no way to know how many of these things he sold, except for in the case of the "Deluxe Version", which had a specific limited number, and which sold out. We can therefore do real calculations.

The deluxe version, by the way, is amazing.

I mean, just check that deluxe edition out. What an awesome outlay, the kind of "kitchen sink" approach I wish I had the option of with more stuff I really dig. You get books, lps, DVDs, cases... you basically buy a crazy-ass Nine Inch Nails library of joy for only $300.

He offered 2500 for sale. They sold out in a day. One day. Do that delicious, tasty math. That's $750,000. That's three quarter of a million dollars. One day. Let's say that each deluxe kit costs $150 to make, which is not going to be true. But if we go with that, then he made $375,000 in a single day. Cold cash. That buys a lot of flowers for Tori Amos.

There's a $75 deluxe version, and a $10 CD version, and a $5 download. So there's all sorts of range of ways to buy it. In fact, there's a specific range for not buying it at all; Reznor put up a "official" torrent up on The Pirate Bay for you to download it. So the divisions are $300, $75, $10, $5 and Free.

Ignore the morons in the comments section of the torrent, except of course for the ones who are totally unimpressed with this whole "torrent" thing by one of the major music artists in the world, who thinks that Reznor should be paying The Pirate Bay for the privilege! Oh, how far we've come.

Anyway, some thoughts.

First of all, what a lot of people on that initial day will remember is how much Reznor's site was fucking hammered. Hammered to the point that you had to wade upstream to give it money, and then it just kept timing out on the downloads. You seriously had this case of tens of thousands of people, money raised above their hands, just jamming into the doors trying to hand off cash. A couple of my friends had this issue, and the question was "Why not just wait a day?" and you know, it just seemed like nobody was willing to do that. They wanted their NIN and they wanted it now and damn if they had to hit reload a dozen times. That's an interesting phenomenon. What were they buying? The music or the ability to have it right now?

Second of all, this seems like a really good idea for my next movie, coming up. One of my mentors, Rob, tells me he would prefer more than anything else just to have a downloadable version of the content. He doesn't need the nice little package and he doesn't need the shiny, shiny discs; he wants the content to come banging down at a couple megabits a second and be on his hard drive. Price point irrelevant. The idea of tiered content, or, as I now call it, "Pulling a Reznor", is rather compelling. Sell a deluxe edition, sell a nice version, sell a basic version for the "WHY IS IT NOT $10" crowd, and so on, up to and including downloads. More on this shortly.

It's too easy for people to see a success and ignore the risk took. An enormous amount of risk was taken here by the NIN organization. I am pleased it paid off.

Don't Interrupt, Jerk

Waxy pointed his faithful readership to an interview with a fansubber. A fansubber in this context is someone who takes a film in a foreign language ("film" being "anime episode" and "foreign language" being "Japanese"). The interview asks all sorts of questions of the process, the ideas behind it, and of course the morality, since this is some commercial product being repackaged and distributed elsewhere (at no cost) which theoretically means it affects the market for it.

Anyway, it's a good interviewee, who gives lots of context and writes clearly without sounding like a dope, but somewhere in the thick of it comes this exchange:

So why do you continue to do what you do knowing that it's having a negative impact on the people who create the anime you like?

That's a tough question. It's one of those things where the technology has allowed it to happen. I can't think of any entertainment medium that hasn't had to deal with this - let's take it back to the late 90's and early 2000's with Napster and MP3s..

Well, hang on there, I'm going to cut you off for a second, I apologize. There is no comparison here to the music industry because musicians can still make money with live performances if their product is being passed around gratis. Anime companies can't. It's not really the same problem.

Well, you're right, but there is a value to be added as far as the subtitles are concerned, and the companies are adding value to the product. But I understand your point where the fansub scene is hurting that, and it's basically that old habits die hard and one fansub group bowing out isn't going to make a bit of difference and everyone knows that.

Woah now! Hold on there, Tex!

Two major problems are here.

First of all, don't interrupt your fucking interviewee. Let them answer the question, and even if you think they're fundamentally flawed in their assumptions, do a follow-up question that either shows up the person's line of reasoning as being in need of recalibration, augment. Don't cut off.

Second of all, you're fucking wrong. Anime companies in fact do have alternate streams of revenue related to the specific video episodes. The actors/singers for an anime's sountrack will do live performances and concerts, posters and figurines and merchandising of breathtaking levels. In other words, the base premise the interviewer brings up is flawed.

Dude, shut the fuck up!

When I first started doing interviews semi-professionally, the single most difficult skill I had to learn was shutting up. I had spent so much time elaborately engaging in conversations, often dominating them, but never shutting up, that even I recognized it was going to be a big problem for taped interviews. I started trying to talk to people and being quiet after asking questions. I'd go to parties, talk to someone, and as soon as they started to tell me things, I'd be encouraging but never redirect their responses into an opportunity from another sermon from me. This was very hard, but I did the best I could.

In some of the interviews, you can hear me telling stories, but a lot of that is because I'm trying to work with people in getting the memories flowing again. I bring up something I heard and they go 'Oh, yeah! When that happened, I thought this was going on...." If you listen to the tapes, you can hear me immediately shut my piehole and let them speak.

The rules of interviewing are simple. Ask good questions. Listen to the answers. Ask better questions based on the answers you just got. Don't read from a script. And don't interrupt.

The interview remains excellent because the interviewee kept moving forward with his thoughts, but it's in spite of the interviewer, not because of him.

Don't interrupt, jerk.

Penguincon

As a side note, I'll be attending Penguincon as a panelist and presenter on the weekend of April 18th-20th, in Detroit (actually Troy) in Michigan. I'm talking about my film and holding forth on an interesting variety of other subjects as well. I'll be making an effort to interact with a new range of folks outside my comfort zone; let's see how that works.

This is just a week and change after Blockparty and Notacon, so for the moment, this is all I can say about this announcement, because my attention must naturally be focused elsewhere. But if you were going to it, feel free to say hi.

The Name of The Game

So, there's a book out there called The Game. This entry is not really about the content of the book as regards the direct subject. The direct subject, by the way, is about the world of Pickup Artists, guys who have crafted methods that border on sure-fire for charming and seducing women. Credit where credit is due; it was this weblog entry by Aaron Swartz and his linked full review that got me to go pick this thing up in the first place.

No, while the subject matter may or may not be fascinating or relevant (I can imagine a range of people who would read it and twitch with anger through most of the chapters), it's the structure of the book that I want to focus on.

The structure of this book is brilliant. It takes a hold of you very quickly, and then for over 400 pages (!) it leads you through all the permutations of a subculture. When you finish this book, you feel like you've been there, seen the ups and the downs, and you feel like you know more about stuff than when you picked the book up. The book is about this subculture of pickup artists, with the author being a star player in that subculture, but that's not what I'm saying in terms of fascination; what's fascinating is that you follow the growth of this subculture, ebbs and flows, and you round out at the end like a car has slowed down a little and kicked you to the curb, onward to more adventures, wishing you could tag along.

Not very many books do this, or accomplish it.

Finishing this book, putting it down and contemplating what I'd experienced going through the stories, it occurred to me that this was the kind of book a hacker, phreaker, cracking subculture could use. It doesn't punch people in the face; it doesn't have to. The criticisms, when they come, are in the nature of the subculture itself. When someone uses someone else, they use techniques learned by others to do pickups; they're just taking it to the next level. It really is the case of "don't hate the player, hate the game". It's reflexive like that; you enter a mindset and you end up on the other end realizing you've been thinking in this mindset throughout the story arc.

It's a narrative; the author is the main character, telling you how things happened through his eyes. He brings in people, helps you keep track of them, but he tells you about himself as much as anyone else. But the thing is, he doesn't start out ruling the world. He doesn't end up ruling the world. He's another player in the story, and yet also asides to you his discoveries, growth, disillusionment, and delight.

I wish a book like this was written for hacking. I wish there was someone who would construct a beautiful narrative, with them as the center of it, going through the era of the 1970s up through to the 1990s. Even if they had to start things at 1985 or even 1995 and reference the "old school" as we progressively continue to label anything ten years old, it would still have a lot more potential to rule.

Reading "hacker books", I grew sick a long time ago of the journalist types going "boy, these are some fucked-up little gumballs, aren't they", snickering the whole time and making everyone out to be a vicious backstabbing automaton. People aren't necessarily evil to the core; they have reasons, fears, hopes that drive them to make bad decisions. Trust me, I can attest to this fact. Evil's an easy thing to write about; just make someone a psychotic robot. Bringing nuance to explain how things got that way is so much harder.

The book is good stuff. You may enjoy it. You may not. But the structure... there we have something truly great. Let's see more of that. Maybe I'll have to write that book myself.

Possessed

You can watch a documentary about a possibly fascinating subject that's about 20 minutes long for free, right now. I simply cannot make it easier for you!

The film is called "Possessed". The webpage to see it is here and includes lots of contextual information, links, and references. It is about hoarding, the mental condition where a person is unable to discard or stop owning items. This condition could be somewhat benign or utterly debilitating. In this documentary, you meet four people, who range from merely curiously intent on their collections to full-out residents of whatthefuckia.

I am, by these standards and of the organizations mentioned in the film, a compulsive hoarder. Is this a big shock to hear? I keep a lot of stuff I shouldn't and I keep a lot of stuff that I want to keep but which a lot of people wouldn't keep. I like to think I'm on the edge of acceptability but by some standards I may not be. I do not feel the need, currently, to go to meetings or consider myself in trouble. Like a lot of conditions, it does have roots in my past (I had a lot of my stuff thrown away when I was younger) but also out of necessity (people send me stuff to join my collections of stuff on my sites and I keep the originals).

I like to think that given the right opportunities I would donate some of my items to proper archives, but I have very high standards for what such a place would be, so it might be a big mental trick I'm playing on myself.

This documentary gets me thinking this way, and that's a sign of a great documentary. It's very simple. It does not have music. It does not ridicule its subjects. It presents you with documentary overview of these lives and the voices you hear are of the people, not some bubbleheaded idiot narrator or the ever-present check-my-haircut-out "news" asshole types. The director took these paths on purpose and I laud him for it.

Enjoy the film, on me. Resist the urge to save it somewhere.

Uninterrupted Power Play

I was impressed by a cute little brainfuck that happened recently.

There's a device that's been made that allows you to take over the power for a computer that's plugged into the wall, such that you can unplug the machine and it's still being powered. You can then move the machine around to anywhere, and then plug it into a new plug and the machine never turns off. It doesn't have to be a computer of course; it could be a radio or an EKG machine or TV, but since it's computers that flip out and do crazy shit when they get unplugged, computers seem what it's really for.

The version of the product that got all sorts of attention is called HotPlug. Where it got a lot of attention, really, is security weblogs and tech weblogs. They focused on it for how it was being marketed: as an easier way for police and agents to seize your computer and take it away.

That's well and good, but it's just a mobile UPS, if you think about it. It's a way to keep power going to a plug and move the plug. That's all it is. The company selling it decided to market it to cops, but it's truly a general-purpose item. I can think, going back years in the hosting business, where being able to tell a customer we'd be moving their box but wouldn't have to have it shut down at all would be pretty damn sweet. I actually did this for one customer's box that had two power supplies; I was able to unplug one, snake it to an extension cord, and then pull the thing along to its new location, stringing the network cable as I went. It was awesome.

But once people have the bug in their mind that this is a fascist tool, the comments fill with hopelessly elaborate ways to foil it. Checks for location, for voltage variance, for activity. You know; delightful spy stuff, the stuff people tell themselves they would do to thwart the man and then they don't even shred their credit card statements before throwing them in the trash.

Compare this with, say, peer-to-peer programs, where it is so ingrained as a piracy assistance tool that efforts to brand them otherwise seem like errant peeps in the middle of a roaring ocean of opinion. People definitely do use these programs for legitimate, nobody's-problem transfer of data; but the mark goes back a decade now and it will be a long time, if ever, before the first thing one thinks of with a peer-to-peer program is "oh boy, faster downloads of my legitimate data".

It fascinates me how a few choice presentations to a neutral technology gives that technology an indelible mark, one that only enormous effort could shift public opinion away from. I have no solution to this; I just see it and try to remind myself not to punish a technology for its potential uses, but to laud/decry the actual uses that occur.

Now pardon me while I cook a roast on this record player.

1000 Little Buddies

Here's the thing about Kevin Kelly.

Kevin Kelly gets about 80 percent of whatever he's talking about right. He makes too wide a jump, uses the wrong term, calls things important that aren't, or vice versa. But 80 percent is pretty darn good and Kevin Kelly is therefore more useful than, say, a Pop-O-Matic. So credit where credit is due.

In fact, let me make it more clear. Kevin Kelly, he of Wired and many other projects in his long life, is like that Really Cool Uncle you have, the one who has a lot of answers, some of them wrong, but who is willing to give you some ideas without acting like he's discovered flight or you owe him anything. He just lets you bounce around a bit and often, you find yourself with ideas or worked-out concepts that otherwise you'd never really plunk together. A catalyst, if you will. You come away with a chat with him feeling like you moved ahead and not behind like I do with, say, Cory Doctorow.

So recently, Kelly made this idea/pronouncement that resonated with people. And by resonated you could define an entire set of thinking by "before reading about 1000 Truefans" and "after reading about 1000 Truefans and running off to your weblog to pontificate".

The short form, which there's no lack of those on weblogs either, is to suggest a survivable business model for a performer or creator, wherein they have some set of people who pay a lot more than anyone else would pay for your crap, but in return you give them better crap than the other people. This way everyone's happy; you get to eat and your biggest fans get a more exquisite piece of you or your output. If the number of these fans hits some arbitrary number, in fact, you can probably even support yourself. A thousand fans giving you $100, for example, is $100,000! Make Money Fast!

Kudos to Uncle Kevin for glomming together a bunch of already extant ideas and giving it a new branding. To his credit, he even mentions some of the sources of his ideas, so again, no punching the guy.

As an extra bonus, he even includes Chris Anderson's quasi-nutty "Long Tail" graph, although he does it by corellating the entire purchasing public to True Fans, which is, as is his nature, a tad off. Not everyone who buys stuff in the major sales period of your work (the first few weeks, months, years) is necessarily a true fan, they might just be some people who bought your crap because you successfully got mention in Teen Beat or Maximum Rock 'n Roll or some such. No, there's a little more filtering to it than that...

I've had people buy the BBS documentary a couple weeks ago, who are excited I'm making a new movie and want to be informed the minute it's out. I've got people who were there with my pre-orders last time who probably don't need to do that crazy pre-ordering again. I've got people who are major fans who didn't give me a dime and probably never will, but fuck yeah, that Jason guy's the shit!!

Still, he's right, there's definitely something to making products available in various tiers, and leveraging people's love for your stuff, however many people those are, and treating them with respect and giving them opportunity. It's called a fan club, and they've been around for decades.

You'd apply to be in the fan club and you'd get special versions of the records, or a nice plastic badge or even special passes to concerts/appearances/events the salient subject of the fan club was appearing at. Surely among my reading audience are several Close Personal Friends of Al or Dementites of the Demento Society.

But OK, fine, people now use "Angel Investors" to mean "non-professional money lenders" because it sounds nicer, until the fights begin. So now people who are more than casually interested parties in your crap are "True Fans". Bear in mind that Kelly has a website called true films which he uses to mean "Documentaries" and by documentaries he means "any film with a vague connection to being related to reality". So "True Films" begets "True Fans".

Like I said, 80%. Nice 80%, though.

Obviously, I've got some pleasant enumeration of people who dig the crap I do. Some people don't like me as a human being, some adore my writing but are ambivalent on my other endeavors, and a number of people have actually flown places or paid good money to get the chance to spend time at an event I'll be at. It's an interesting mix. A lot of people don't know I'm the guy behind some of the stuff I do, so that adds even more fun.

The BBS Documentary had pre-orders. This was a delightful success. GET LAMP will have pre-orders, no doubt about it. GET LAMP had the Adventurers' Club, which was that rarest of things, a terrifying success. I don't think of the people who go into these jaunts as being more "true" fans than others. They just have a different level of liquidity/opportunity/approach to my stuff. I pre-order a lot of things, because I like long bets, and I've dropped some cash in various directions as needed. I don't think this means the people who don't are some sort of sub-class of the audience. They're just the audience.

Seriously, enjoy Uncle Kevin's Funhouse. Just don't assume he's 100% on the money.

Stories

Way back in college, I stayed in the relatively quiet dorm. No particular reason; it's just the one I ended up in. I did not get to live in the party dorm.

The party dorm wasn't officially the "party dorm" like some colleges might have; it just happened to be built in a way that encouraged craziness. It was a converted hotel, or more likely a hotel and multiple buildings, and so all the hallways were wide and crooked and extraordinarily weird. I visited people in this dorm and these rooms, and I have strong memories of the crazed dissimilarity between various places in it. One pair's room might look like it should have hospital beds (white, non-squarish, tons of windows), while another might look like the college didn't like your kind (smallish, low ceilings, dark, facing an alley). Some rooms had two people, some had three, a couple nightmarish scenarios had four or five and one had, as I recall, six.

As an extra bonus, there were people living in this dorm. What I mean is that these were people who had 99 year leases on their apartments, and the building had converted to a dorm around them but they were still living there.

I made a bunch of buddies in the weeks before school started, and one set of friends had a room together in this dorm. There was the big guy, the rakish Mark Hamill-looking music whiz, and the suave curly-haired fellow with the silent but friendly air. They got a relatively large room, which also had a weird-ass little alcove in one corner, which was probably a closet four thousand years ago but which now one of the beds got shoved in.

One of them had worked in a record store, and so he brought 2,000 CDs. I am being very specific here, he brought two thousand CDs in cases and filled one of the bureaus with them. Also, before classes started, he hooked up with a girl going to a nearby college and moved into her apartment, leaving his stuff behind. So now they had thousands of CDs and music. And beer. I remember all sorts of beer.

Parties happened in that room, including one at the beginning of the year, co-hosted by one of the room resident's father, which grew so loud and out of control that it took five RAs (resident advisors, little quasi-employees of the schools recruited from the student body) to knock on the door. The parent came out and explained in no uncertain terms that if he was spending thousands of dollars to house his kid in this dump that the party would go on. The party went on.

One of the parties I was at had a rule of checking ID. Big ol' sign on a sheet explained this, behind a prodigious amount of liquor. Two young ladies came in, and whoever was behind the bar asked how old they were. They said they were 15. "Got any ID?" he asked, and they did. So they got a drink.

Within months, this room was a war zone, a collage of ripped paper, lost socks, broken plastic and all sorts of forgotten dreams. I remember being over on a Saturday morning chatting with one resident when the other came in and drank from a random assortment of bottles, looking for a buzz. What I remember most specifically about this period was that the beds, which could be converted to bunk beds as needed, had been converted to a triple bunk bed, with the middle bed being used as a shelf for books and garbage and the top bunk had someone sleeping in it, in a manner that would guarantee memorable injury were he to fall out of it. This freed up space in the room, for sure; even with the really high ceiling, this bunk was coming close to scraping against it.

Ultimately, the freshman year drew to a close, the residents of the dorm filtered out, and I ended up having one of the three residents of this room invite me down to his parent's place in New Jersey for a party. At this point, we hatched a plan to get an apartment together instead of paying the ruinous fees for a dorm, and our next set of adventures began.

Now, why mention all this?

I mention this on two fronts.

First of all, it all really happened; I am not making anything up here, throwing things up a ratchet for the sake of entertainment or devising statistics that are intended to impress or dismay when in reality they were not this way. This is how it happened and it's real. This sort of stuff happened all the time and I observed it, and 20 years later I can remember it, primarily because I was stone cold sober the whole time.

Second of all, these are stories. They're all just tons of stories, stories that I remember, that I gathered, that I sat around in when they happened and thought to myself "Well, look at this." In our lives, these things happen by the truckload. I recall from one of my interviews I conducted with Eric Greene, who turned out to be one of the top ten interviews I did, and he said, basically, that we all convince ourselves that we have normal boring lives and need to spice them up, but we in fact all lead interesting lives. I agree with that. It's all in the telling.

Stories, these building blocks of recounted happenings, are created by the truckload, every day, and as we all become more and more connected, these stories are being told with greater and greater frequency. I am trying to visualize how it must be for the group fo kids who occasionally mail me, who are now in their young teens and have always known a world with a world wide web, always known that everything out there is just one "http://" magic spell away, could find anything they wanted in moments and the way they've always known this. I wonder if they think that these stories are all false, or if they must be true, or what all this storytelling must mean. What meaning does this din of smirking recitations have for them?

I know that for many of them, the textfiles on my sites reflect a simplicity, a sort of ease with the world that they cannot have; if someone takes your picture with a cell phone, it ends up in the world's hands within moments. If you say something hurtful about someone in a fit of adolescent anger, your words are trapped forever, and nothing you say will change where they've gone. To these kids, they often speak how wide open the world was back then, that you walked away from phones, not with them. You waited in line to be on-line. Your computer did a thing and that's all it did. These are rapidly becoming a romantic memory of this lost time, with the downsides sort of smoothing out into quaint irregularity. Like living in a castle, sans a window. Nice in a photo, not so nice overnight.

I wonder, sometimes, what our new world of storytellers with voices so loud they circle the world and last for years will yield.

Webtrap

I've recently been able to figure out the phenomenon of a webtrap.

There's a site called dannychoo.com, the adventures and experiences of a guy in Japan called Danny Choo. Danny's a technical guy, a photographer, an otaku, a fan who wears costumes... and he's also a great tour guide, giving you context to life in Japan. He's really good. Really, really good. Like, too good.

He's so good that one of his entries can take me 30 minutes to read and I can finish reading and still not feel done. I feel like he just put out the nice pamphlet that I could browse for hours while on a train or walking around, giving me insight and more details to research. Each one of his entries is this little microcosm.

In my web browsing, I have to keep moving. I have so many things I'm looking up, so much stuff out there. Like a shark, if I stop moving, I die. (Also, my eyes look scarily dead and people think I'm super dangerous and I am mostly not.) When I find a page like Danny's entries, I have to say "OK, this has to wait" and I set it aside.

In no time, I have DOZENS of his entries set aside. Entries of sparkling detail, of context and regard and insight, waiting for me. Piled up, and waiting.

Danny consistently does this, but others do this too. It's a mark of quality, no doubt, and I am complaining of the weight of the riches, not the pain of poverty. These are meals that pop out of the little slot when I bang the vending machine a few times looking for junk food. They are wonderful.

While browsing these weblogs, I will stumble on these, and go "Oh no, webtrap." I find a page where someone has meticulously linked to so many cool things, that I could lose a day going through them, and at the present I do not have days to lose. I have less than days to lose. I am going to start cutting some major stuff out of my life so that my film gets done on time. I can't afford to spend two hours on an amazing overview of a subject I always wanted to know. Or a subject I didn't know I wanted to know about until right then and there.

Haaaalp, trapped.

What Are These Feelings?

Sometimes I have strange feelings, very difficult to articulate.

In the cases that I'm talking about, it's how I get about narrative approaches to code. I am completely entranced by narrative approaches to code. If I find one of these examples while browsing, every single other thing in my life gets backburnered until I finish digesting the narrative. It's like finding a unicorn. You drop your pack of gold and hold onto that sucker because you're going to get a wish. This sometimes leads to major decision trees that have probably led to a lot of "Hello? Where are you?"-type missives directed on me. I apologize to everyone, in retrospect and advance.

Here's some examples:

• Why the fact that you can make some points jumping near Donkey Kong on the arcade game version is a bug and not a feature.
• A collection of heavily commented Atari 2600 cartridge disassembies.
• The process of improving Crazy Climber in Free Play mode.

Coding is magic to me. Over time, obviously, it has lost some of the zest and spring because there's such a large industry associated with it and people can let the hardware do the thinking. That is, they no longer find themselves with a bucket, a length of rope and an orange and have to get to the top of a castle. They say SEND_TO_CASTLE and they're done, they don't even care what's happening under the hood. But when you take 20+ years of experience with coding and the advances we made, hie yourself down to these long-ago games, and just rip them apart in the operating theater, I'm going to be one of the interns up in the bleachers watching everything.

Does this stuff sound familiar from me? It might. I've certainly done my share of raving for Krakowicz' Kraking text files, and this care paid off in an interview I scored with him a couple years back.

It's the tour guide aspect I love. It's the guy at the front of the boat, telling you where to look, giving you the context. Sure, it's a bunch of code, but what was going on when it was made? Why were these choices made? Why was there such intense work to make this one piece act like it did? The tour guide, a good tour guide, will wrap it all up for you. Even if they're not 100% complete, they send you on the way you would want to go to find out even more.

I think, personally, the future is in being a tour guide. I think that's what we're all becoming. I'll write about that shortly, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, I never get tired finding out how large the collision detection block is in Donkey Kong, or how well they tried to hide the chips in Crazy Climber... and that ultimately, no secret got left behind.

Sleep Lab 2020

Sleep Apnea is where your body forgets to breathe while you sleep. Or, to be less dramatic, an "event" where your oxygen intake is below average. For some people, this almost never happens while they sleep. For others, it happens constantly. I have sleep apnea. I've likely had it for a long time, but I am not sure; I was asleep at the time, after all.

The problems with sleep apnea are pretty memorable: you might die. Also, you have reduced energy since your body is basically going "HEY! HEY!" all night and clanging on the pipes to send down more oxygen, motherfucker. This fills your body with a general sense of unease, like when you're on a date that looks like they're the marrying kind after one dinner. I knew I had a problem with the sleep, but I kind of toughed it out since I figured it was just the way things are.

Recently, though, I decided I had a lot of living left to do, so I've been going through trying to find all the fun stuff wrong with me. I'll be seeing an allergist, and a kidney specialist, but I also insisted I go through a sleep lab study, to see if anything is actually out of whack. After all, one can convince oneself of anything. Maybe my snoring was A-OK and just a misery to unfortunately proximate companions/associates.

(In the late 1990s, I was convinced that I had destroyed my hearing; I decided to go get a test. I went to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear infirmary and after a battery of tone listening and reporting, I was told I had better than perfect hearing. So sometimes the dice fall in my favor.)

In a sleep lab test, you go to a hospital and meet up with technicians, who have at their disposal a set of rooms. My room was a bit huge, and I feel like they must be used for something else. My technician, Will, was friendly and genial for about 2 minutes but quickly fell into a depressed state; this must be the worst job in the world... or he has sleep apnea!

They measure your heart/brain activity, breathing, and muscle movement. All well and good. What this means is they attach electrodes to your face (4 places), head (4 places), legs (4 places), chest (2 places) and attach two bands across your stomach and chest. They also strap this mask onto your nose that goes up your nose. And then you get to go to sleep, like Alex did in Clockwork Orange.

While you sleep, a camera watches you via infrared. This is all rather scary or perhaps exciting, depending on your own Maslow's pyramid of needs. For me it was just great that I was finally getting this looked at.

Another neat feature was they record your sleep. Snoring, talking, and so on. Since they do this, they also say that if you need anything, just ask. When I woke up during the night, I simply said "Will, I'd like some water" and a voice went "Okay". That was the best part.

What was not the best part was a gout attack at 2am. Turned out that strapping a belt across my stomach triggered some unpleasant movement with my kidney stones and off I went to the world of pain. My left foot started hurting very badly and there was no way I could continue sleeping.

This is OK, by the way; the documentation that came with my sleep lab appointment explained to me that they only needed a couple hours of data to really understand you, so even though I only slept about 3 and a half hours before having to go home and drop tons of pain meds, they got the data they needed.

It turns out I have over 15 "sleep events" an hour. So once every 3 minutes while I sleep, I stop breathing or otherwise have my body freak out from lack of something it needs, that is, air. This means I'm due to have a fitting for a CPAP machine, which will force air down my throat while I sleep. I've been told that after a few weeks of this, you don't even recognize yourself. Here's hoping!

Pleasant dreams.

Hard-Won Information on Editing with USB

Boy, you can't get drier than that for a title, but I thought I'd mention all this anyway.

While working on some of my editing, I discovered a small (about 20) set of clips from my collection are in fact dead. Black screen, empty soundtrack. Still the size they would be if they had data, but they don't.

See the little black square in the upper left? That's bad.

Well, nobody likes stumbling on that. Luckily, my paranoid approach to all this works out: the description of what's in the clip is there, and I have the date, and I have the raw footage at hand, so I can re-extract these needed clips with little issue. Bear in mind I'm well over 1,000 clips so the percentage affected by this is small.

The issue is that I used USB drives. But actually, not that I used USB drives, but I used a specific type of USB drive.

I get kidded for the use of USB, but it works out for me and it's cheaper than a lot of alternate approaches, and I offload a lot of quantifying and recordkeeping from them so they're simply and truly storage. I have copies of all data across them, and I utilize local internal drives. At least, I do more than I used to.

When I would render from Vegas, my editing program, it would render out to a holding bin on a USB drive. Specifically, a Seagate 750gb External Drive. These are enjoyable little suckers, with a nice tough case and real heft, and it helps when you have a massive stack of these things like I do.

Well, among the "features" on these drives is "spin-down". In "spin-down", the drive notices nobody has been talking to it for a while. So it goes emo and shuts down. When it's requested by the parent OS going "you better get out there and mow the lawn", there's this delay while the emo drive gathers up its stuff and its iPod and goes out. This pause makes my entire OS pause. Ain't pretty.

Anyway, Vegas was apparently doing this clever thing where it'd make a request, not get a timely response, then get one later, then render out as if there were no issues. Result: black video, silent soundtrack.

Some time ago, I switched to rendering to a proper SATA internal drive, then pushing out to a few externals every day or so. This obviated the problem. But going through editing, I found these little reminders that nothing's too easy, nothing can be looked away from and just assumed to be perfect when you need it.

Lots of little lessons come up like this. I just thought this one would be interesting to mention.

This is very nice footage. Even if occasionally very emo.

The Character Assassination of Jason Scott by the Coward Ed Cunningham

Whoever gets annoyed by that title, just calm the hell down. I was doing a cute reference to this movie title, which you have to admit is pretty memorable.

Well, OK, I want people to calm down but in fact this entire weblog entry is about flipping out, so feel free to get all wound up again. Actually, do whatever you feel necessary; in today's wonderful world of online discourse, we'll get to do anything we want to so that trend might as well continue on here.

I promised I was done writing about that movie and I am, I totally am. Instead, I'm going to write about some back and forth related to it that you might not have been aware of, and what that means in the greater totality of stuff.

After I started getting dozens and dozens of links back to my weblog entry, I knew it was just a matter of time before people related to the production would find it. It's not that hard to find me and I'm not being Mr. Ego when I say that stuff I write about tends to get the attention of the people being talked about, if I talk about them. Witness that whole thing about the Electric Slide, where I got the Electric Slide creator, the plantiff and defendant in the only dance copyright case, the EFF lawyer, and a bucket of Greek Chorus. I'm not saying what I did necessarily deserved their attention, but for the current golden age of weblogging, my doing so held enough prominence, arbitrarily, to get the focus of all those related people for some short time. It's nice. It will eventually go away.

When people write to you with opinions that you have written about, you don't always get positive responses, especially if you compare their creative output with sodomy. Hence, they tend to write rather energetically in a direction non-parallel to your own. I like getting those perspectives. None were forthcoming from the producers of The Movie. OK, fine. I have a lot of pillows and they absorb a lot of tears. But I couldn't imagine they didn't, you know, stumble upon what I wrote.

This lack of imagination on my part was validated when I found out they had read about it and were writing about it. Not to me, mind you; that would be too easy. No, they were writing to people linking to my writing to "set the record straight" or at least try to dissuade them from talking about it too much longer. Major mistakes were made in this process.

The writer, Ed Cunningham, who was producer of this film, insisted the writing be confidential. Well, dude, someone has totally misjudged what the concept of confidentiality is. You implement confidentiality in two fashions. You demand confidentiality because someone is under your chain of command. You insist it be kept confidential that your company made X dollars selling things one way and Y dollars selling another. Trade secrets. You demand this of your underlings or contemporaries or you add the "confidential" marking on the communications you do so that it is clear to people within the chain of command above or below you this is sensitive. There's a whole science to it. You're doing it wrong.

The other way you demand confidentiality is this. You write to someone. "I'd like to speak to you, but it has to be confidential." The person you are speaking to either tells you they're totally down with this or you should go fuck a couch. If they say they're down with it, then you speak to them confidentially. I've done this myself, both as the receiving and providing parties of the confidentiality. Upon acknowledgment, the receiving party gets your confidential missive and you are communicating. Pre-emptively declaring confidentiality is poor form.

Oh, there's a sort of third way, but it has less and less meaning these days. The third way is that if you demand confidentiality upon the writing of your communication and the person "breaks" this confidentiality, they are revealed as a harlot and can never work in this town again. This third way depends on three premises that are not very valid: that anyone gives a toss if you're a harlot, whether there's a "town" to no longer work in again, and whether you have any sway whatsoever to get someone declared a harlot in this town. This is, as I said, a nearly impossible conflagration in the modern era. Go fuck a couch.

Anyway, so the confidential but not really confidential message got forwarded to me, and the positions were, roughly:

• We have chosen not to engage Jason publicly.
• This letter is confidential and we're sending it to you.
• Jason is wrong.
• Jason uses information from people at Twin Galaxies, who don't like the film.
• Jason is a biased filmmaker who hopes to one day make a documentary about arcades and so he's bitter.

I disclaim that these are my summarizations and feel free to post the real letter somewhere and then call me wrong.

Anyway, I can't speak to the fact that I have had to rely on Twin Galaxies and related folks as one of the sources of my complaints, beyond the fact that I definitely did. Yes, I used other parties to discuss this film, parties that felt wronged by the film. Yes, yes, I did.

As for any amount of "oh no, Arcade is ruined" thing, I can completely assure you that Arcade is not ruined. I have 20 hours shot already, and I expect by the time I'm done I'll be at the 200 interview mark and it will be longer than the BBS Documentary was. When you live your sad little existence thinking of everything and everyone as "fuckoverable", "fuckupable", and "other", then I could see where you think I'm non-positive because my movie's been "killed" or some sort of zero-sum game bullshit. But let me assure all parties: Not the Case.

It is remarkably cheeseball to go about this by sending back-routed letters about this whole thing to people linking to me. It is definitely less cheesy than having strawmen make fake accounts and implying something untoward about me and my motivations and the rest. But make no mistake, OK? It is cheesy. I realize that the window for your little flick's sales is about six weeks from time of release, which was four weeks ago, so you're just gritting your fucking teeth hoping my untoward statements will just stay out of your goddamn way until the release window is over and you can relax. I know how it works. I don't like it but I know how it works.

But let's get beyond all this and even the sleazy tactics of Ed Cunningham, who appears to have an excellent future in the world of filmmaking, and whose name I expect to show up mysteriously and spontaneously in the future releases and discussions of my future films. Right now he is working hard to make a highly fictionalized movie based on a shortcut-filled documentary. His comfort level with this sort of activity is why you will never see me doing the "Hollywood" thing. OK? OK.

Now, to get to what I am primarily trying to say.

Realize that online discussion is very useful in some ways and very problematic in others.

On the plus side you get immediacy, truly global access, and (more than a pool hall debate anyway) permanence. You can cross-reference, you can engage immediately, you can argue like hell while home, then go to work and keep arguing, then get out your phone while out at a restaurant and argue even more. You can, in other words, never stop arguing. With BBSes, you had the problem of one caller at a time, so you only had a short time to make your stuff count. You might back off, then. With in-person debates, you are less likely to use language like cretinous fucktard in the course of describing your collaborators. When you engage online, you totally lose all those self-limiting conveyances and can get right to pure, uncut argument.

Unfortunately, this position of mine is, even though it's laced with profanity and apparent cynicism, idealistic. The question of a debate is, how much is too much?

We've all seen this. A guy says something. Someone responds negatively, in a paragraph or two, or maybe even more. The original guy responds even more to that person. To some people, the debate is now over. This appears to be magazine limit, the rate at which most magazine debates end; article, letter to editor, response from writer. You cross some threshold then. I am going to coin it. I am going to call it the zota threshold.

Here's zota's weblog. zota's name is Jason. He's an engaged guy. He's smart. He's definitely not a slouch. And, if you spend the time going over all my stuff, it is zota who has pushed things to the level they are now. I can't imagine I would have written an eight thousand word weblog entry about a subject if I hadn't gotten such a tough customer in zota.

Watch him in action over here at Will's weblog. This is not run of the mill discussion. Seven go-arounds occur, each one is progressively hostile on both sides, each one draws in more facts and suppositions, and I think each of us has a point when we go "Oh, come ON". Not, and this is important, not because there's nothing left to say and not because all the points brought up have been addressed, but because this medium, this immediate, global, permanent medium is being stretched in very odd places and the format of weblog entry and comments is obviously not the best container for the ocean of discussion being brought up.

In fact, and since zota has more than once come up with theories as to how I do things, my own impression is that only if we were to assemble in a room myself, Ed Cunningham, Seth Gordon, Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Steve Wiebe, Michael Moore, Robert Shaye, Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi, strap us to chairs, videotape the whole thing and then ask an unbelievable amount of questions under oath would he be satisfied. This is, utterly, his right, but there is a point when the diminishing returns of such an approach outweigh the aspects of truth being plumbed.

For my own bit, I try not to get hung up on the specific debate but what the greater meaning or context is. Teach a man to punch someone in the face and you get a boxer, but teach a man to punch anyone in the face and you get a weblogger.

The reason half of the mongo entry was about BBS Documentary was because I wanted to draw parallels to how these sorts of films are made and what they mean, or else I would feel I was truly wasting my time. The number of people who were so explicitly unhappy with my verbiage up to that point that they enunciated it to me was one: zota. So instead of being stuck in a zota-loop, I made the context greater. I think the essay has more meaning. Some, however, don't get it.

Some, also, don't want it! For many people, the zota threshold is not three go betweens. It's one! They don't want this stuff gone into beyond what's there. They might make commentary on it, but not in the way one comments on a work to bring greater meaning; they just want to squirt a little whipped cream of themselves on someone else's work. Comment pages encourage this, and I've begun to see a trend where sites are starting to put the commentary elsewhere, on a separate section, linking back to the work. I can see why they would do that. I could see that very much indeed.

These extremes of the spectrum (I don't want to talk about it, I wish to talk about it until all relevant parties die of old age) belie the number of people in the middle. The whole reason I got any attention at all was that a lot of people would see The Work, then go online and see Commentary on The Work. They wanted to know more. They didn't need to read a book and half on it, but a nice set of paragraphs with greater context was just what they were looking for. Being sucked into a debate regarding truth and editing was perhaps an unexpected dessert, but OK, they'll browse a little of that crap before they get bored and see what else is up. It's not their job to know every single last debate and detail, especially when it appears some aspects are subjective. At that point, a 14-round comment go-between of two people pushes from an interesting discussion to a rapidly fading noise down the hall that you're walking away from very briskly.

This problem of the zota threshold is not going away. I'd like to consider more of it.

But not for that long.

Truth in Numbers

You might be surprised that I feel bad for the creators of the Wikipedia Documentary Truth in Numbers.

People who knew me as the writer of the most definitive critique of Wikipedia have occasionally asked me why I wouldn't turn my documentary-making skills to doing a documentary about Wikipedia. Simply enough: any such film I made would be a polemic, a op-ed piece shot on video. It would be expensive for me to do properly. And every single interview with be charged with unpleasant energy. The resultant work, even if I did my best to be accurate, would be considered a biased slam-piece, made by someone who didn't get it. It would be an awful lot of work for an unpleasant result, unwanted, uninteresting. So no.

But one needs to be made, and the guys who assembled to do it for Truth In Numbers have been hard at work doing it for the last couple of years (with the last year or so being full filming). They've been editing it, and I had expected them to be at South By Southwest, but apparently they just barely missed that boat.

In keeping with the "spirit" of Wikipedia, there's a Wiki of sorts about the movie (warning, it IMMEDIATELY plays music and video when you go to it). There's a non-wiki version of the movie's website as well (unfortunately, it ALSO IMMEDIATELY plays music and video when you go to it.

I watched the production from afar, and assumed, quite rightly so, that it was going to be one big love letter to Wikipedia, one huge goddamned hug about how incredible Jimbo Wales is and what a messianic figure he is and what an awesome thing this whole Wikipedia is and how anyone who doesn't absolutely love the fucking thing is going to end up as peat moss in the garden of the Web.

That said, these are not slouches: these filmmakers obviously work at their craft, and have been filming this movie for two years. That's not an in-and-out cookie-cutter schedule. They're taking it seriously.

Was I cranked I've never been contacted for an interview, even though they've passed through my geographic location a couple times? Well, sure. But not in that "I've been wronged" sense of being passed over; I'd rather be known for something other than being a Wikipedia Critic, thanks. It was more of a case of seeing them travel worldwide, talk to all these people, and I'd wasted time some years back coming up with what I think are cohesive arguments as to why