ASCII by Jason Scott

Before the LOL: Rocketboom Mix

The talk I gave at ROFLcon, "Before the LOL", was captured by several entities. There were some internal videographers streaming me to the net at large via the Ustream service, and there was also Rocketboom, a weekday video weblog that puts up little hacked up films about people, places, things.

Here is the remix of my talk on Rocketboom.

Bear in mind you're seeing probably two to three minutes of a 50 minute presentation. For some, this may be all of me you want to take, so it'll work out just fine. Others might enjoy the talk more seeing the full version that I've been told is coming out later. I intentionally set up the speech to not need fixing up, so hopefully it'll look and sound good. WARNING: Amish Hat.

As a nice bonus, you see me kiss Steve Garfield on the forehead, and call him the Gift of Boston. I interviewed Steve six years ago for the BBS Documentary, and since then he's gone on to become one of the bigger "Video Bloggers". He never tires, never gives up making his funny and smart content, and so I was really happy to see him there.

I'll post a more elaborate overview of my talk when it's downloadable. Needless to say, I go in some crazy directions in that speech, which people liked. Unfortunately, I was scheduled up against a "LOLcats" panel, in which some of the biggest stars of the event were assembled to give their thoughts. People chose one panel or another to attend, and a lot of people who wanted to see me ended up going to the other one. So soon everyone will enjoy it.

By the way, the photo of me above came from Scott Beale of LaughingSquid, who I met at ROFLcon for the first time and is this really amazing photographer on top of everything else. You browse his photos of me and I actually look pretty damned human! Considering the lighting condition, the angles and final appearance of my presentation looks incredible. You could do worse for an afternoon than browsing his photos of the event.

This is only the second time I ever had something like presentation software showing images during my presentations. The first time was at Google, and I figured it'd be worth it. This time was because I walked the stage and thought this massive screen was too beautiful to resist. I was right. I'll probably stick with my non-software-aided presentations generally in the future. I consider it the equivalent of a tie: gotta have one for certain situations but it's more comfortable not to.

Here's hoping the full video arrives soon.

Flickr-y Flood

As promised, I dumped a bunch of stuff on Flickr.

And by bunch of stuff, I mean a lot of stuff. Something like 1,200 photos so far, with another thousand likely to make it on there. Like I mentioned previously, I think this is way too much for anyone to get much out of it without a tour guide, but I figured you might like to know.

This page of collections is probably where most people would want to start. A lot of this is elsewhere but the Flickr interface is faster and easier for a lot of things, so you might discover stuff you didn't check out before.

It's pretty easy to dump stuff in; not so easy to arrange and tag things so they have all the old information. As time presents itself, I'll tinker. Until then, enjoy the cascade.

ROFLcon (After)

OK, in a word: ROFLcon was fantastic.

Many other words come to mind: Perfection. Delight. Surprise. Thrills. Variety. Triumph. Every positive adjective I can think of, superlative words on the bottom of my bag that have not seen the light of day in many months, come out with fervor and stick to ROFLcon's side with no ill fit. This was a special, special event and I am so very lucky to have been a part of it.

Like many ideas, it came in a flash and with a lot of scratching of heads and skeptical eyebrow raisings. I don't pretend not to have been part of that contingency. In fact, I was likely a leading candidate for Grand Poobah of Doubt. Asked to help organize the event, I spied some of the mailing list and quickly retreated from any administration or backstage duties, fearful of the time sink and resulting disaster tarring my jacket. I was left on the mailing list for the administrators, however, and it was there I witnessed something quite inspiring indeed.

Over the months of planning, these kids (and they really are kids, barely in their twenties and a few of them not quite there) saw through barrier after barrier, secured many thousands of dollars in funding, called and cajoled and convinced attendees and speakers to play a part in the conference, and hatched something brilliant.

ROFLcon, to summarize, was lauded as a "conference of Internet memes". Memes, in this case, mostly meant "celebrities", and celebrity from actions and events more than positions or wealth. These were the kind of celebrities who could be summarized with a noun and a "guy" or "girl" appended at the end: Tron Guy. Sweater Girl. One Red Paperclip Guy. Chuck Norris Facts Guy. I Can Haz Cheezburger Guy. On and on, and over time this list grew quite large indeed.

The whole thing wrought large, actually; upon the weekend of this happening, hundreds had been joined up, either as attendees or speakers. These speakers included myself: I was asked to give a historical presentation, and my indifference to this assignment grew to heady anticipation as I saw what a gathering storm was occurring.

Slated for Harvard's halls, the event grew so large it was moved to MIT, along several buildings. MIT organizations helped with space and logistics. The organizers reached out to other groups for promotional items, ads, printing, and artwork. It became very real.

Of the two days, Friday was a work day for me - I was one of the first presentations. My talk, "Before the LOL", attempted to give an overview of the rise of cutesy little ideas being passed along for the hell of it, along with a sense of how human beings have always kind of acted the way they do online. I touched on some pretty out there subjects like slow-scan ham radio and office copier art. It pulled off very well and was well liked by the audience as far as I can tell. More details will come on my talk as it goes online and I assemble some related material about it.

The rest, however, was me just being awash in the fun. It is rare to be at an event where I am not just fascinated by the names on badges, but consistently amazed by them. Administrators of sites I use daily were next to artists I'd known for years. Old friends came out of the woodwork, while I made entirely new ones. I autographed items, and resisted the urge to ask for autographs myself.

Did I agree with everything said and every characterization of the ideas presented? Of course not. That's not the point, to find like-minded folks to parrot to you everything you already knew. Echo chambers are not worth getting out of bed for. This was a place where certain things were assumed (we all use the Internet, we've all seen these famous things to various degrees), and what came next was a celebration of being alive while being online.

There are many writeups of the event, and many photos. People did their jobs of capturing this whole event and I feel quite redundant going into detail. But I will take note of several things.

First of all, there was a real vital sense of fun and joy throughout the event. It wasn't "for" anything; not selling a product, introducing a new technology, forcing a hipness down our throats until we were dazed enough to sign up for whatever it was we needed to sign up for. It just was, like assembling a huge party of cool and smart people and just letting them go. I've been told the SXSW conference is like this, but SXSW sells stuff: bands, movies, books, products, technology. This just was, a celebration of people who spend time online walking around and basking in the joy of communication. I don't see enough of that.

Second, an event like this is ripe, one might even say begging, for exploitation and cynicism. Writers whose job is to sneer at everything around them are also in abundance regarding this event. Like any other conference of folks assembled around a theme, it's easy enough for someone to dash off a handful of cramped thoughts about being there, scarfing down the free pizza and checking their Blackberry for new calls, than it is to accept that there was something special there. There was. I felt it and throughout the weekend I was part of it.

Kudos to that gang, those people who worked so hard so near where I live so that I could have my horizons split wide and my circle of acquaintances bound in directions I'd have not dreamed possible.

Poptastic Quiz

OK, here's your homework.

Suffer, if you have the inclination, through this episode of "Boing Boing TV", a regular feature of the Boing Boing weblog, which discusses the upcoming film Speed Racer, a special-effects laden summer blockbuster from the makers of the Matrix Trilogy. (The episode is entitled "Speed Racer is "poptimistic": interview with John Gaeta, part 1".)

Remember when people who considered themselves vanguards of Internet technology bleated and blorted about how on the Internet, things would be different? Loosed from the constraints of the current mass media paradigm, they could really take the discourse in new directions? Sure, a lot would be stupid and petty and weird, but a lot wouldn't. Unquestionably, if you were tired of being spoon fed pre-packaged goat pellets, you were in for a treat.

So here we have an episode of "Boing Boing Television", the newest feature of one of the unquestionably most popular "weblogs" currently extant, which would not be out of place in a low-funded television station on the ass-end of a major network syndication feed. After a couple seconds of from-the-studio footage of a major motion picture, we get the BoingBoing TV logo, which includes lifted (and uncredited) audio from the song "Video Computer System" by Golden Shower, and then, at the 10 second mark, a big fat ad for BMW, telling you this was "brought to you by" a specific model of BMW car. 30 more seconds of from-the-studio footage follow it.

From there, a tarted-up Xeni Jardin asks a bored John Gaeta such probing inquiries as "Did working with this movie change the way you look at vehicles?" (which he responds with "I don't know") and we're peppered with Gaeta's prepared speech on choosing the specific design of the film's special effects. Throughout his mentioning the technology, we're given more canned studio footage of the "making of".

At the three minute mark, because surely we've gotten bored with this discussion, we are treated to a 30 second ad for the model of BMW car the episode was brought to you by.

Three more minutes of Gaeta giving canned responses to Xeni's quiet nodding and a spastic camera shot are interspersed with canned studio footage from the movie, along with shots of the movie's logo. We then receive quiet credits which include links to the movie and the information that this goulash is creative commons licensed.

Is that it?

Is that what it's all about?

The best we can get is a 6 minute ad for a summer blockbuster broken up with a BMW ad, brought to you by a BMW model, while a person with a journalistic background asks meaningless questions of a established Hollywood technician which he ignores and answers with canned speeches? Is it 1988? Are we satisfied with having a low-end Entertainment Tonight cloneclip without the benefit of full 720x480 resolution or adequate sound and video technicians?

No, Xeni, Cory, I don't want to hear your fucking excuses. You horn on enough about sites like TED.COM that feature exciting people discussing amazing ideas and theories, people off the beaten path and who are beating the path we might all eventually take. The audience contributes ratings on which talks are the most interesting, funny, jaw-dropping, and so on. In these clips, which are also brought to us by BMW, we are given an engaging sound logo, followed by a 2 second "brought to you by" and the BMW logo, followed by anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes of someone being fucking amazing. Nobody peppers these people with inane overtures to launch into canned monologues selling a product; they deliver rehearsed yet engaging presentations of whatever they know best. So we know this sort of thing is being done... You're just not doing it. A lot of people are not "doing it".

Somehow, with the same opportunities (you certainly run into enough brilliant people along the way, you own a camera, you have BMW sponsorship), TED.COM shows class, insight and depth where you eject out sugar pills of Hollywood movie ads. Are you going to step it up? Are you going to talk the game?

Then play it right.

Hacker Photos: The Unexpected Return

Editing clips of video means a lot of time rendering them out. While this goes on, I have time to make a few other things happen. One of them is clearing out some of my junk drawers and putting it up to a more accessible position. Among the stuff I grabbed a long time ago was something called Hacker Photos, which was someone's attempt to gather "the face of the underground". What he mostly did was capture everybody who has both a newspaper article and a DEFCON badge in their scrapbooks. Well, whatever works. Some of these people are friends and the attempt to capture "the underground" is an appreciable act. So here that site is again.

The date of it is 2001 but I'm sure I caught it a little later than that. The "photos" seem to be culled from screengrabs of video, newspaper articles, and various scanned photographs taken over a range of about 10 years. As time goes on, this functions more as a lovable album than a real "rogues' gallery". The addition of some of the canonical UNIX and Internet pioneers is a nice touch as well.

I'm sure some people in these photos are unhappy about this. Well, sorry. Someone thought you were a hacker, once. Now you're awesome. I assume anyone who judges you based on these photos is not really your friend or not worth working for anyway. Hang loose.

More fun stuff soon.

Your Tour Guide Future

I'm putting something like a thousand images and scans up on Flickr. I guess that's interesting.

The concept, of course, is interesting to a certain segment of people. Oh wow, a thousand images, and Jason tends to collect neat historical stuff, so it'll be a thousand images of neat historical stuff. Oh wow, they will say.

But to another segment, they will never simply browse a thousand images. They have no time. I'm the kind of guy who uploads a lot of images but so do others. People are uploading images so fast to Flickr that there's just no way to easily get a sense of it all. None. Same with weblog postings. Compared to all this, movies are a steady stream of droplets you can easily catch in a cup.

This has been said in different ways in different places, but I've become a strong believer that the future for people looking to make a good buck is to become a tour guide.

We're no longer in the position of there not being enough "stuff". There is so much "stuff" online now that a person who wants to find "stuff" could now spend the rest of their natural lives browsing through it. There was lots of "stuff" before but now you can have it fed to you consistently and constantly forever. This is both wonderful and depressing.

The process of getting "stuff" is becoming easier, quicker, slicker, more a natural part of existing. I don't mind this, but it does mean that we're getting flooded with content, of which a small amount might be inherently interesting to a specific line of thinking. If I'm looking for, say, the history of glass insulators, there are places within flickr, ebay, websites, weblogs and FTP sites I would probably find interesting. Others might be interested in it too. All of us could appreciate someone being a tour guide to find all this. Some of us might want to be that tour guide.

A tour guide, when good, helps save time by taking you to interesting things, but additionally understands if you want to break off to study things closer. A tour guide knows that not everyone in the tour group is a crazy goddamn fanatic who needs every last detail, but just wants to get a sense of thing. And a tour guide chats with other tour guides on ways to make the tour even better.

We have "linkblogs", collections of links people dump and others drop on them. That's nice. We also have places where people kind of assemble weblog-entry-like paragraphs and put them up and people comment on them. Also nice. But in both cases, they're linear tours, one after another, with a lot of the same ground being covered again and again. Hey, look, someone drew using a etch-a-sketch. I've had to sit through a few dozen "wow, nice etch-a-sketch" weblog entries or linkin'-log entries and see everyone discuss them again. Often, shaking the etch-a-sketch is discussed. Sometimes people mention other cases of insane work being done using children's drawing toys.

I suspect there is a gap out there for sustained group tour guides of stuff. I'm probably visualizing something like what wikipedia currently fulfills, without the additional moronities of policy and fucknuts. A place where you're clicked in and others are adding links to it and photos and you browse until you're sick of it and move on. A nice little tour.Variations of this exist but we're not quite there yet.

Regardless of a software solution, I think we'll always need people, people who are willing to construct little walking tours for others, who enjoy showing off what they've found and putting it all together. I think this is what we need more of, the missing piece to this collecting of stuff we're all inevitably doing in our lives.

You even get to wear a jaunty little hat.

The Secret Cost of the Database

I made a discovery the hard way over the years, in the way one doesn't like to make discoveries. That is, I made the finding that database maintenance is hard.

Oh, sure, laugh at me and my vital announcement of a thing well known, but there's a more sharp edge to the coin besides just knowing that databases can be difficult. It's that, without knowing it, you can find yourself in charge of a database and the maintenance of it.

When I started bbslist.textfiles.com, I didn't understand that this little lark would be a daily (and I do mean that, daily) maintenance task for the next eight years. People send me changes, updates, descriptions, and artifacts for that BBS List Database pretty much every single goddamn day. I am happy to have the duty and the pleasures of maintaining this list, even if people sometimes get a bit pushy about it.

But there we go, a daily strapped-on duty and chore on top of my other stuff. So when I think about projects I want to do, I have to ask myself: will this become a database? Will this become a database requiring maintenance? Because honestly, I probably have to walk away at that point.

At some juncture I had this idea of a "who owns what" database. You'd type in the UPC product code of a item you bought, and it'd immediately tell you what fucked-up, evil corporation you just plunked your cash over to. People are sometimes not aware that they're dropping bills into the hat of what they would think was a completely non-related competitor but in fact is a big daddy to your favorite little munchable. Hay has been made along these lines.

But the thing is, these sales and purchases happen every month. I'd be in the critically sad business of tracking corporate earnings statements, taking letters from people on boring consolidation announcements, and probably ending up going somewhat crazy. Also, I'd never be quite accurate. So no, let's not do "who owns what".

Similarly, I had some sort of idea to do a compilation of photos taken at all hacker cons. In fact, I own a domain, conphotos.org, for this. But the fact is, I'm stymied along two lines. First, Flickr does this a thousand times better than I do. Second, a lot of people don't want their fuckin' photos used without their permission! But ultimately, again, this is a database, more pain in the ass, more needless maintenance.

So on, and so on. I have a lot of waylaid projects that translate to "please give six months of your life to this", when six months can be spent in other arenas to a greater level of quality. I just don't see myself having that time, that way. I get suggestions for things I "should" do and the fact is, when it turns out to be a big maintain-me-daddy database, I have to say no. Again. And again.

I do what I can, but realizing this fundamental fact has saved the world a lot of half-baked Jason-maintained databases.

99%

Going through the process of making a documentary a second time causes me to come face to face with a few situations I'd forgotten about. You tend to gloss over stuff, and forget some of the sharp edges. I guess it's how we cope.

Anyway, I have drives of footage, which include stuff that has been gone through and stuff not gone through. There should be no reason for stuff to have stuck around in "not gone through" except for time; the process should be methodical. However, there were two sets of interviews that have been sitting around way too long.

The reason is they're dark.

The camera I use is a little tricky in some light situations, and it took me a while to really learn some of the situations it would freak out in. As a result, some percentage are a bit too dark, dark enough that you would notice if I put them side to side with other shots. The nature of digital recording with video is that there's also a greater noise floor in the video when you look at them closely.

This is all fixable, everything is always fixable, but given the choice of sitting through watching my dark shots and going to the shots I'm really proud of, I keep going to the others. Luckily, I'm running out of choices and that means I'm nearly done with the clip-making. And it means I'm going through the remnants now.

Given a choice between a dark shot and a light shot saying the same thing, I will choose the light shot. This gives advantage to one group of interviewees for no good reason. 99% of the dark shots may not make it in. It makes it very hard to set the time to go through them, know it may reveal just seconds of used footage.

But it has to be done, and I am doing it. It's just tough. It always is.

Silly Jim Leonard

Oh, Trixter, you silly person.

You work yourself up into such sadness while life has handed you nothing but jewels and treasure.

You state dreams and projects you feel could not be finished, to feel like your life is going to be a series of incomplete projects choking your days and filling them with regrets. Ha, I say. Ha! As if to butter the corncob of despair with a melted yellow layer of irony, you point to accomplishments of my own as examples of being left behind, missing opportunities, being incomplete.

You probably never intended to name your two sons after the greatest comic book characters in history, but you expectedly did it, and that's awesome in itself. In fact, it's a sign. You never intend to do the greatest things ever, but you end up doing them anyway.

I had this mulled idea of doing a documentary on BBSes, this concept that was like many I would probably have fiddled with and then forgotten forever, but then I heard about this little project you were involved in, and I was inspired by anything to absolute do it. And I knew I was doomed to try to pull off a DVD by myself. I knew I needed a guide, a mentor, a tour mensch to make sure I did everything right and not just passably. And who did I turn to?

Here we are, intertwined in destiny, two young kids who both attended the North American International Demoparty in 1996, and we didn't even meet; we lived different and separate lives and yet we each traveled many miles to be in that specific place to be a part of the proceedings. That says something, yes it does.

You list off your projects like they're insurmountable mountains. Tell me how you found yourself in Utah winning a competition handily with your 8088 in tow. Tell me how you found yourself in two runs of Blockparty grabbing prizes left and right and meeting heroes. Now ask yourself, who inspired me to want to make Blockparty come together in the first place!

Haven't you realized yet how much I love you and will help you see things through?

Adventurespiele

Hey, did you know I can speak German? Neither did I!

"Ich habe vorher ein paar Jahre an einer Dokumentation uber Mailbox-Systeme (BBS) gearbeitet und als ich damit fertig war, merkte ich, dass ich viele Fahigkeiten aufgebaut hatte, die ich noch woanders einsetzen konnte."

OK, fine, I was translated from english answers I gave. That was nice of them.

I don't know how much people who read this weblog will find new, but there you go.

The Quirks of Penguicon

I was at Penguicon 6.0, which is the first time I attended it. Therefore anything I say is from the point of view from attending a mere 16.6% of all Penguicons.

I was asked to speak about interactive fiction, and what the hey, I have to brush up on talking about this subject because I'm likely going to be doing so often for the next couple of years, so I agreed. A little later, I was told that to pay the reduced presenter admission instead of the full $45 admission, I'd have to present on two more "panels" as well as the one I was going to do. I was given a plate of five that needed speakers, and I chose the two I was least uncomfortable speaking about. I stress two facts here again: as a speaker I was required to pay, and I was thrown on two panels not because of any expertise I might have but because a body was needed for those panels.

From a speaker's point of view, that is, someone like myself who has done a few dozen presentations of this format at conventions like this, the whole thing is run horribly. I didn't, for example, totally lock onto the fact that I'd be paying admission because I've never seen that before, anywhere. Presenters that have to pay? Why? In Penguicon's case, it appears to be because they pack the schedule with so many panels, in so many locations, that the only way they could possibly have anything approaching decent income is to charge those panelists, as hosting over three hundred events means that you can't be giving that much admission money away. OK, well, OK.

My two additional panels were "The Future of User Interfaces" and "When the hell did video games become cool?". Left alone, I'd have not chosen either, but compared to the other three I was given to look at, I chose these.

Some time later, my co-presenter on the User Interfaces panel canceled. The way that I found this out was my name-catcher caught my name on a random livejournal post, mentioning, as an aside, that my co-presenter was not going to make it. As a total lark, and because I knew he was coming, I mailed the presentation person that Paul "Froggy" Schneider was around to be my presenter. Later, Froggy did a reload (this was the day before the con) to find out he was on the schedule. This is how it was done. No confirmation.

During the day of our presentation, Froggy did a reload and found out we had another presenter on the schedule. This is how we both found out. No e-mails. No confirmation. Sure, you could point out "we had 300 events to manage, so we didn't have time to confirm", but then the immediate question is why the hell did you schedule 300 mish-mashed events instead of, say, 100 good ones? I still have that question.

For the actual presentation/panel, Froggy and I showed up. Our third presenter didn't. Maybe he wasn't notified he was on the panel and didn't do a reload of the schedule to see if he was on there. Either way, there wasn't a third presenter, so I grabbed someone out of the audience and put him on the panel. As it stands, Adam handled things very well.

You can't see how well the panel went because there were no recordings. There weren't any recordings in any of my panels. Sorry. I generally record these things, but something told me not to and that something was right. Froggy and I had a good time, at least.

For my presentation on Interactive Fiction, the reason I'd flown in for the event, I walked in at 9:30am for my 10am presentation to find an empty room, no sound set up (it was in the corner behind a screen with no set up projector), and a pair of mattresses on the stage. So fine, I presented anyway. A nice set of people came in. I never saw a staff member. In fact, the whole weekend, I never interacted with a staff member of Penguicon except when I bought my ticket that I had thought (wrongly) I'd not have to pay for.

The final panel was similarly done, with no staff members, and the panelists doing what they could. We all agreed the topic was stupid. We went back and forth and I do what I always do when I have no script: talk and talk and fucking talk. I don't mind hearing myself talk, obviously, but who knows what all those folks came into the room looking for.

So yeah, if you're a presenter, and/or have experience with any cons out there (professional, non-professional, what have you), then this has to be one of the most adrift cons I've ever been a part of. (And I was at a couple Rubicons, friends. I know adrift when I see it.)

However, if you were an attendee, it was probably pretty great.

The people, who I saw milling in the hallways and walking the rooms, were really nice. These were folks out for a good time, and I think they got it. I saw smiles, singing, loud drumming, and costume wearing that was both in a spirit of fun and not at all uncomfortable.

The consuite, which was loaded with free food and conversation, had happy people at all hours of the day and night. I met some folks I'd been looking to see for a long time, and we had great chats. To finally meet Frank Hayes was a big deal for me, as was seeing Randall Monroe (although he was surrounded and I got no time with him). I met some people to potentially interview for my next documentary projects, and I got to eat some awesomely prepared Liquid Nitrogen ice cream.

I would therefore equate Penguicon with a really cool party bus that, if you don't make the effort, you won't notice has the steering wheel and gas pedal taped down with duct tape and a note saying "turn off if near wall".

One specific moment, however, particularly struck me.

I was on my way over to the LAN party room to find people, and I passed one of the larger presentation rooms. Something was going on, likely, someone with a guitar. I wondered if it was Frank Hayes, and paused for a moment, and stuck my head in.

At the back of the room, somewhat near me, was this guy. He was a little older than I was, and he had a plate of muffins. He was holding it like a cigarette girl, carrying it while also watching the proceedings. He turned and saw me, and smiled.

He made this sort of gesture, a "welcome! come on in.", with a smile. I can generally read people. He meant it. It wasn't creepy. It was touching. He was honestly seeing someone on the fence of coming in and honestly was saying "come on in". It was very sweet of him. If I hadn't had something to go to, I'd have stepped right in. That charity and inclusion wins a lot of points with me.

Still, I was later asked if I would be there next year. I said yes. I meant no.

Digger

Truly, digger.org is the way it should be done.

Celebrating ten years of effort, this website is dedicated to a relatively obscure game called Digger that came out for IBM PCs in 1983. I was one of the owners of this game, and absolutely loved the thing. A riff off of the arcade game Dig-Dug, it had, at the time, an amazing combination of sound and graphics, and felt like I was playing a game worth shoving quarters into. I enjoyed my time with it but life happened and I have very rarely thought back to that program.

Andrew Jenner, though, went ahead and did right by Digger, many times over. The program, long since incompatible with modern machines (in 1998), was in danger of being completely obscured and difficult to ever enjoy again. He disassembled the program, rewrote what needed to be rewrote, and made it compatible to the present day. His website goes into the process in great detail.

In fact, he goes into everything in great detail: the graphics, the company that made it, the programmers and people, the many little facts that are relevant to Digger, whichever direction you wanted to go.

I thought this was what the world wide web was going to be; I thought it was going to be a place where you could find, with ease and excellent presentation, all you needed to know about a subject that had caught your fancy and bring you along to not only being educated on what you were looking for, but get an entire bushel of additional information you never expected you would find. This is not borne out to be the case, generally, but it's certainly the case here. I wish more people took Andrew's approach.

Check out a game that was fun playing the first time, and worth playing again and again.

Quick Interview: Drive and Despair

One of my fine users sent in the following four questions. I figured everybody had to hear my answers right now, so here you go.

When you first started publishing, did you ever feel in moments that you had some trouble getting people to notice? Did that impact your feelings about your projects? If it did not, then why?

Well, I've been publishing an awful long time; the first time I wrote stuff that other people had to print and others had to listen to was probably my role as Humor Columnist for Horace Greeley High School back in 1988. I did a calculation at the end of the school year and I'd written more for that paper than anyone else, likely over a dozen of the other staff members combined. For the April Fool's issue of that paper, I wrote an entire page of text, which is crazy looking back. And yes I have all the articles I wrote online. They're pretty OK, considering I wrote them all when I was 16 and 17. I also started a school humor magazine, Esnesnon, which I have the first issue of online and which went on, absolutely astoundingly, for another 10 years at that school.

Before that publishing, of course, I had bulletin board systems. Years and years of them, starting from when I was 11. Since I was delighted to have any outlet whatsoever, I got a lot of experience just writing stuff for the joy of having it somewhere else besides inside my head, where maybe it should have stayed. Left alone, my writings are a little more "me me me" than even now, with elaborate creations like this one being loosed upon the world. So I was "publishing" in a way with almost no direct feedback that I was even in the ballpark. San that feedback loop, I had little worry about it.

In college, I was on the school newspaper, school radio stations (FM and AM) and did a little work with a humor magazine. For the newspaper I wrote articles and drew editorial cartoons. Throughout that college newspaper work, I don't recall many times someone would engage me about anything I did, outside of some chats with other newspaper staffers. There just wasn't much in the way of feedback loops or seeking legitimacy/meaning in the words of others. I just liked doing it.

So no, no real impact either way, so when I work on my stuff now, every bit of contact/feedback (and there has been a lot more from the films and the weblog than I can ever recall) is a bonus. It's a little extra niceness, not a required part of the transaction. I get fan mail and hate mail, but it doesn't make me stop and go. I do listen, however; if a lot of people tell me something and that something wasn't a particularly strong personal choice, I'm more than willing to shift things around or improve/sully the project as needed.

I've never considered you a divisive figure, but you do have your share of critics. How do you deal with the emotions that come from people not agreeing with you, not liking you? Does it ever get you down? Why? Why not?

What a nice way of putting it.

One has to make the division between Jason the ASCII Blogger, Jason the Documentary Film Guy, Jason the Textfiles.com Guy, Jason the wizard of a MUD, etc. All of these reach different sets of people to different amounts, with some overlap but not complete overlap. I've found I'm thought of in radically different ways by different people, and in cases where those two worlds crash together, I get to watch "Jason is a Great Historian" meet up with "Jason was a cockbiter when I dealt with him in 1994". The reasons for hating (and liking!) me are variant: a personal slight, a disapproval of the way I phrase things, the way I'm a bully in some spheres, my overarching love of myself, and all the other little faults I've been informed of over the decades.

What I have determined, if one wants to take the jump of calling this "wisdom", is that doing anything to any degree before others results in criticism. I won't use the self-serving term "taking a stand" because it sounds like I'm always in the right. But going out there, stating something clearly, means that you've set yourself up for someone to come along and say "Man, that guy's totally wrong". Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time sets you up to have it quoted back at you. Saying a LOT of stuff over a LOT of time sets you up to come face to face with contradicting yourself, being reminded you took someone's pain too lightly, or made a silly declaration that you never should have.

When someone seems extraordinarily pissed at me, I spend some time chasing down the source of that animosity, just to make sure it's not on the level of a gas leak (an ongoing situation I can rectify) as opposed to a forgotten slight (I called somebody something very bad once and they never forgot it).

On the whole, however, I have so many nice stories and so many great times with people, it'd be hard for me to turn away from those and say "everybody hates me, I should pack up and leave". I don't even know if I could really "pack up and leave", it's kind of the way I am to be this out there. I do recognize the need for knowing I am not universally beloved.

Did you ever feel like that despite your best efforts, you simply are not heard in the way you want?

I am positive of this. But I have to clarify that the question is among the realm of "Did you ever feel, getting on a bicycle, that if you didn't keep pedaling, your momentum would stop and you would fall over?" It's kind of the nature of things that we miscommunicate all the time. We lose either the ideas themselves or the context of them, or they're presented in strange ways. Look at my documentary; I have this nice little package I put together, but people sometimes watch it on Google Video or torrent DVD-ROMs or watch ripped MPEGs and so on. That's how they see it, and they're fine with it. I'm fine with it too.

How do all of these things impact your momentum? Do they? Even for a second? And what do you do about that if it does?

In your letter, you hoped I wouldn't respond with pithy short answers, but I have to say: it doesn't. I'm doing what I do because I feel I have to. I'm working on stuff that I think needs to be done. I am of such a strong mind of this, I have worked hard to ensure you can enjoy or benefit from the stuff I'm doing without ever directly interacting with me. Tens of thousands of people do this on a daily basis; they use my sites without having to know anything about "the guy". They watch the movie without knowing me (you can watch some episodes and never hear my voice). I enjoy spending time with myself but recognize not everyone does, so I appreciate the ability to avoid me entirely.

So I have no contingency for criticism halting me. I don't think it really can.

Goatse Metrics

I was doing some chart work recently, and it reminded me I have the data for a year of goatse'ing people, along with pre-goatse logging as well. I decided it was time to run the numbers. Here's some charts:

The Goatse switch-out happened on January 1st, so we can see an immediate change in the first chart. 2007-01 happens, and usage drops down massively. At the time this happened, and it got a lot of attention, people said that I'd brought even more pain on myself because it meant now everyone being linked in through all the weblog sites would use more bandwidth. As we can see, this isn't the case. Myspace wastes galactic amounts of bandwidth; it appears every time many people go to webpages, they reload all the background images, including the Grim Reaper picture I used to have. Once they started ripping it out, even a link-fest from all the discussion websites couldn't top that generic Myspace rapeage.

Since the usage was so massive before the Goatse'ing, I ran the second chart just to show usage from January of 2007 through to March of 2008. Here, we see a growth and then shrinkage; after people hear about the Goatse thing, it goes up a ton, then starts shrinking rapidly. In both March and May of 2007, about 75,000 people are Goatse'd or request to be Goatse'd.

The third chart goes even more granular than the second, showing the per-day story for being goatse'd. Obviously that massive spike in the beginning was all the weblogs finding out about it a day or two after I did it.

I can also tell you, definitively, that the goatse image was downloaded 703,899 times in 2007. Again, even though that's an impressive number, the previous Grim Reaper image had been downloaded 2,531,662 times in 2006. Yes, that's right, two million five hundred thousand times. My goal was to cut down on abuse of that image and I can assure you that it worked.

Uther - Net

I love getting mail. I especially like getting mail of stuff I ordered some time ago that is being hand-crafted for me and has to be sent from other countries. That's particularly enjoyable mail.

Today's mail provided me with a cute little device called the Uther Ethernet card. You are either going to be excited or indifferent when I tell you that this is an ethernet card for an Apple II.

Come on, say it: Apple II Ethernet Card.

There's some history of Apple II Ethernet, but it's a sad history, that ended badly with no actual cards being sold. All of this happened in the 1991-1993 era, and while there was a nice amount of discussion and press release about this item, it never actually existed. So the Uther's existence was a big deal.

Mine came from a hand-made batch of 25. That's the level of craftsmanship we have these days in the more obscure sectors: two dozen item runs, all hand-checked and mailed out. In some crazy way, it's not unlike the dawn of personal computers, when you knew (or maybe refused to know) that the computer item you were getting was made by some guy or gal in a back room in an office somewhere, one of a tiny run of equipment you'd paid well for.

You get something like 70K/sec transfer rates out of your Apple II. Suck it up! That's great!

And if you're wondering how one actually accesses the Uther card, you need some sort of IP stack running. Luckily for anyone now sweating that idea, there's a great little OS called Contiki that exists out there and will interface with this card. Pretty cool, huh.

I love this stuff, and that 2008 would be the year of getting one of my Apple IIs into my home network.

More-iarty

I forgot how the whole thing got started (I think it was a conversation, or maybe an e-mail) but I started helping some students at WPI (a nearby college) with interviews of historical video game and gaming figures. What this consisted of was having a few students over, talking about editing, showing how I think about it, and answering some questions. In both cases this has happened, I also sat a student down and interviewed him blind, that is, not knowing a single thing about him before the interview started. Later I edited something together and sent it along, just to show some of my techniques.

Last year, these students ultimately interviewed Ralph Baer, he of videogame legend. This year, they interviewed Brian Moriarty, he of Infocom, LucasArts, and general amazing guy, one of my favorites.

I found out that their paper summarizing the process and a bunch of footage of Brian Moriarty is now up at this page. It's all there, even the PDF of the paper for easy download and viewing. I see the students have taken my position on King of Kong. I don't remember being in that mode when I saw them, but maybe they're just reading my weblog.

If you're waiting for my film to come out, you can't do much better than to spend some time listening to the Professor as he talks about the industry and Infocom and where he thinks everything is going. They took my editing suggestions to heart (I'm impressed especially with a segment where Moriarty shows the craftmanship of an Infocom Feelie) and they're a delight to sit through.

Enjoy the show.

Memories of a Scoundrel

While I'm mucking about in Napster-era land, I did want to harken back and give some regard to a little program that popped up in the middle of the peer-to-peer boom times that really got my attention. It was called Scoundrel, and at the time, it really opened my eyes to where things were going.

At the time, we had Amazon, which was a massive repository of not just books and music to buy, but information about that music. Covers, track listings, reviews, and in some cases preview snippets were all in one place. In another realm, we had napster and napster-like servers (OpenNap comes to mind) with lots of various MP3 files, often divested of creator information, and of variant quality. (MP3 tags, a hack that brings to mind the SAUCE format of ANSI, later made nomenclature easier).

Scoundrel combined them, earning its name exquisitely. It would allow you to browse an Amazon page about an album, read up on it, and with a single click, send a smart agent off monitoring various napster/napster-like services, looking around for all the tracks, and keep doing so until it had acquired all the tracks it could, leaving you with an MP3 rendition of the chosen album.

It had some good extensible ideas, like a nod towards plugins for sites other than Amazon, and for services other than Napster. It had some strong potential to become the bridging program behind a lot of sites that were, inherently, vicious rivals in the wild. It was something else.

Here's a mirror of that original Scoundrel site, with some overviews of what was at play, ways to use the program, forward-looking statements and the rest. How kind of that fellow to keep a copy around!

I wasn't the only one enamored of this project, either; here's a nice rant regarding Scoundrel and what it meant to the author at the time.

Most notably, a little while into the project, the creator disappeared. The rant mentions this and I'll mention it too. He up and left, telling us we'd never see him again. To quote specifically:

"Well, so much for what scoundrel has and has not done. As of today, March 1st, 2001, I will no longer be able to continue development on Scoundrel. I'll be disappearing from the face of the earth and will not be reachable. I will not go into the reasons behind this."

Now that's a short goodbye!

I am sure one day we might find out who did it, or not... but either way, I remember the "holy crap" aspect of Scoundrel's appearance, and even though integration and interaction have become nearly standardized (and they call them "mashups" now, in between sips of diet cola), this one really blew me away, way back when. Truly, that's all we can ask of scoundrels.

The Decade Cometh

In October of 2008, I will celebrate ten years of running textfiles.com.

I am actually at a loss of how to exactly mark that occasion. A party? A little badge-y do-dad on the website? Finally get the torrent going? A web redesign? A new hat?

I'm sure no matter what I'll have a long, drawn-out essay on the experience of ten years of textfiles, but I can quickly touch on a few things right now.

Obviously, I had no long-term plans for this site other than getting my old BBS collection together. I wanted to do my part to get stuff up "there", and I can say with all honesty that I did a good job of it; I very rarely find stuff coming in that isn't on the site in some fashion.

Even somewhat recently, I had a fellow say hi to me at a party, who had found out I ran textfiles.com. Now in college, he'd learned about textfiles.com when he was 13, and had spent all his teenage years browsing it, picking up ideas, moving forward with research, and generally inspiring him towards his degree with computers. That is as great as it gets.

If I do do a party, I need some months to plan for it. I'll have to think what'll do best. The official "birthday" is October 8, 1998. It's been quite a trip.

Napster: Did You Forget?

I figured I'd take a moment for this little reminder.

Napster was great. My friend Deth Veggie of Cult of the Dead cow pinged me in an e-mail and told me I had to download this Napster thing and try it out. This was 1999, when it wasn't all that known. I thought it was pretty darn neat. I liked how it felt like a FTP server, but also had a chat aspect, and people were spreading stuff around, allowing them to either talk with others while downloading, or just sit there and pull down MP3s. The downloads were single threaded, but I certainly didn't notice at the time; I thought it was great you could browse through others' collections, like sifting through their records or cassettes while at a party, but you'd get to take everything home. I really did think it was something special.

There's a book out there, All the Rave, that purports to cover a lot of the Napster story, from Shawn Fanning's birth through to the final breakup and sale of the Napster company. I read it and feel it's probably mostly accurate. It certainly feels right, and has a good amount of sources. If someone has a conflicting recounting of tales, I'd like to hear it.

The central thesis, however, is this: the Napster company, once it was incorporated and flying around in earnest, was designed to be a buyout target for any record or media company suitor, selling over the technology and "flipping" the company as quickly and as profitably as possible (and this is important), while providing copyrighted content for free. Beyond that, when the timing started to shift, the deal fell apart, but barely so; record companies really were going to reward the Napster executives with substantial amounts of cash in return for having facilitated the duplication of hundreds of thousands of music tracks.

Peer to Peer, itself, is rather fascinating and I should go into some depth about its ramifications and meanings and so on in the future. I want, however, to focus on one little point.

Without a doubt, without a doubt, Napster was working hard to make money off the backs of recording artists. Tell yourself it was great tech (and it was) and it introduced people to genres of music they hadn't heard before (and it did) and that it was an amazing moment in time when all of us were combined into a throbbing god-head of sonic sharing and intimacy (and we were). Let yourself be told, as we've been told in the last 9 years, about how evil the music industry is (and it is) and how poorly it treats many artists under its purview over the decades (and it has). No questioning here, no rebuttal to these plain and simple facts.

But when the members of Metallica, unaware of the full technology and forces at work, used to doing things its own way, stood up and spoke out against this wholesale smash and grab, when they flailed about trying to find support for what they were saying about having their music being used to forward a business plan without any compensation going to them, they were pilloried. Yes, I'm fucking defending Metallica.

Metallica were one of the rare pop-culture bands who owned their own master tapes (Frank Zappa did as well, after a lengthy legal battle or two). This was a hard-won situation for them, with a lot of fighting behind the scenes, a lot of threats, and decades of nasty attacks from an industry ostensibly designed to support artists like them. They were a mighty bitter group, used to standing up for themselves, when nobody else would. They'd earned this money for their families, and expected to reap the rewards for a long time.

Suddenly, Napster arrives, and all these songs they'd fought dearly to have the right to sell were flying out the door, while a company leveraged their music to build up their own sale value.

I'd be pissed; wouldn't you? Wouldn't you wonder what you could do? And what if every person you talk to has almost no clue about how to legally deal with this situation, what it means, who's really behind it? How do you even seek recompense and halt this action, when there's simply no precedent in the court to even describe what's going on?

I've grown tired, in my old age, of the cry of the person who thinks that copying something, by its very act, benefits the copied and the copier. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes it is not the case. It is not a by-default awesome act that you duped something that is available for sale and did not pay anyone. The only way that comes to mind that it's by default awesome is if, generally, you have embraced your inner pirate. Bootleg, who was one of my more energetic interviewees is known for embracing his inner pirate way back when; I have corroborating stories that when he hosted Apple II copy parties at his house in the early 1980s, he'd supply lots of beer and dress up as a pirate, fake parrot and eye patch and all. That's embracing your inner pirate. Bootleg never sat around talking about functioning as some sort of honeybee cross-polinating ideas for the tangential benefit of content creators.

Yet I still run into this, this idea that the very act of not paying for something is itself heroic, while simultaneously acknowledging that some level of copyright/patent law is valid. Choose one, blackbeard. Stop trying to play both sides and act like you're a statesman enmeshed in the delicate negotiations of the weight of the future. Download your free shit and go.

At the time, Metallica had no pillowy mounds of mashed-up content jiggery to convince them that Napster hoisting off copies of their stuff was a good thing. It wasn't a good thing. So they threatened, and got on the air and gave interviews, and tried to raise awareness of all this going on. They were totally in the dark, truly musicians trying to function in the legal realm, and like many bands, they had precious little experience in such ephemeral spheres. We are still coming to terms with this issue, and they were hip-deep in it, feeling their livelihoods were at stake.

To this day, the fact that they spoke up, said this was wrong, and lashed about trying to find some way to stop this, is held up as some sort of victory on the part of downloaders. Metallica is, to this day, criticized and satirized for standing up for what they believed in, and looking back, I just can't see where they had many options. Told they'd have to list which users were using Napster illegally, they did just that, delivering reams of names of people sharing the song. Hamstrung in court, proving racketeering charges (and make no mistake, Napster well and truly was a racketeering organization) and made out to be some sort of evil presence. What a terrible nightmare for them; what a shame.

This is just 9 years ago; what will people say happened back then in another 11?

CPU Not Required: Making Demos with FPGAs

Jeri Ellsworth is one of those people who shouldn't exist. She has an amazing life story, dropping out of high school because of the success of her racecar fabrication business, which was followed by a successful computer store business, and then she made the logical jump: learn chip fabrication and low-level assembly coding. From this has come a number of famous toys and electronic items, including the Commodore in a Joystick, where she implemented an entire Commodore 64 into a tiny chipset for the goal of being able to play a few games on a TV. From this, by the way, an entire community of people have turned it into the most incredible things. All this aside, she's a bright and humorous person, a great conversationalist, and is currently working on opening a pinball arcade in Oregon.

We'd met at a couple conferences (she stopped by DEFCON a few times, I stopped by a few vintage computing events), and we talked about her maybe coming out for a Blockparty. When it got to be time to find speakers for Blockparty 2008, I proposed it to her and she was all for it.

Jeri's talk, which is now available here, is really something else. A few speakers, including Jeri, asked me how technical or deep they should get into in their talks and how much of the basics they thought should be covered. My opinion was that they should focus on what they've personally learned that's new, and let people do the research to get the basics. And boy did Jeri go deep! I remember swimming along in the depths of the subject she was covering, and being nearly lost. This was, to me, a good thing. It's not that hard to find information on FPGAs out there, but once you get that knowledge, you get the advantage of Jeri's opinion on them, having spent years developing using them, and there's so much in this talk worth catching. She also gives a preview of the no-cpu demo machine she was working on that ultimately let her and The Fat Man win the Wild Competition at Blockparty. What a treat!

Keep a second window to look up the tough stuff, and enjoy the swim.

Sorry, Fired.

There was a new version of this weblog. It is gone now. I am back at my old one.

I tried to upgrade. It was painful, obtuse, silly, required me to spend 3 hours writing rewrite rules, and then presented me with dogshit. I have lost a day of productivity, and I am seething at this.

Weblogs are simple things. Please don't tell me they aren't. Applications, engorged with obtuse feature sets for irrelevant standards conjured by latte-jittered man-children are not weblogs. Applications get to be complicated and huge and silly, and when composed of terrifying blobs of PHP and Perl and Rails and whatever other common nouns/abbrevations are, they can be as silly as they want. But I don't want them.

I want what I download and install to look like my weblog currently looks. I take advantage of a tiny, tiny set of features and I am a happy person. I concentrate, after all, on getting projects done and doing my writing. I'm still spry enough to compose the odd script or two to do something repetitive, like a gallery of images or some other nib-nab. I don't need to be wrapped in an entirely new made-up markup language to get my job done.

Sorry, I shouldn't have to negotiate stacks of embedded templates in form after form, rooting around as if some sort of rodent, with the hoping and faith-based leaps of wishing that, at the end, I'd end up with an actual black page with green text on it. That's insane. I deny it and reject it.

No, I do not want "assistance" and "help", pulling in favors for the ultimate goal of making software that obviously does not do what I want it to do, do what I want it to do. That just leads to the inevitable conclusion by others that I was somehow able to do it on my own. And it would be so not true.

Anil, you're a great guy. Your product blows. Keep smiling.

Blockparty: 4k Music

At the first Blockparty, BarZoule was scheduled to come and speak with his cohorts in Northern Dragons about 4k demos. He was scheduled for a time and then had to pull out at the last moment; another speaker filled his place. This year, BarZoule (who also won the Demo competition for 2008) offered to make up for this with an impromptu talk to fill a space left by a canceling speaker. This talk was recorded and is available on archive.org.

It's entitled "4k Audio: Dos, Don'ts and Pitfalls" and probably the most entertaining part for me is the inevitable artistic speaking BaZ employs and he works his way around English. Hailing from Quebec, BaZ goes in some very strange linguistic by-paths, but the content is still pretty amazing and very understandable.

The talk is even more impressive when you find out that BaZ slammed together his powerpoint presentation on a teammate's machine while listening to another talk. Everything is borrowed and he's doing this all for the first time in front of a crowd. Quite a show when you keep that in mind.

And what is the talk actually about? Well, BaZ is one of the wizards of the darkest of arts, the 4k demo, that is, a graphics-and-sound demo program that is 4096 bytes in total. 4096 bytes! To have anything coherent come out of such a small program, and have it play music or show graphics, requires a surgeon's steady hand and an artist's eye and ear. BaZ's talk walks you through the music side of things to learn some of his magic tricks. Very informative.

More of the Blockparty talks coming up.

Suicidal

I'm like everyone else; put enough crushing torrents of sorrowful actions and forces onto me, and my mind muses that perhaps there's an easier way out of it all.

Granted, it's obviously not been successful and I have no intentions of it being successful, but it does happen, even to me. I figured I'd mention this because sometimes people see me online, or in my presentations, or with my other projects, and they think that surely I have rage days but not suicidal days. Well I do. Far from each other, rare indeed, but there you go.

Many things ensure my continued existence, ranging from the trite to the fundamental.

For example, I'm very busy. Lots to do, lots to get done, a lot of people have given me stuff to work with and I'm not going to leave a big pile of their stuff in my office with a sign saying "Gone Fishin'". I said I'd do it! I'm doing it!

Similarly, I have projects like my documentaries that I should really get cracking on. Leaving those half-shot means that, very likely, it'll end up being Uwe Boll or Kevin Smith editing them and then where will we be?

Also, I'm quite aware of what a tragic thing it would be and it would cause a major disruption in schedules.

I can keep taking this tack forever, until I get to the more heartfelt stuff, but I very rarely need to. When even trite reasons seem pretty compelling, then it's somewhat obvious I'm experiencing some sort of Despair Illusion, not unlike an Optical Illusion, where my natural despair seems to be deceptively infinite, a pool of horror and self-doubt that extends beyond forever. That's terrifying and unsurmountable. But like I said, it's always ended up being an illusion.

One good night's sleep, one well-done song, one phone call or one hour-long spate of mouse-clicking later, and the insurmountable is merely Stupidly Large. A few more calls, songs or mouse clicking, and it's just Needlessly Tragic. In a week, I forget what was so infinite. In a year, I remember that thing that got the ball rolling, and I feel a little sad.

I mention all this because if you're some kid without the experiences I've had, and you're that lost and sad and alone, you should probably be aware it happens to a lot of people, and it gets better. There's stuff to do, so wail out the hardest of your despair and then give me a call. I need someone to help me with my projects, and a near-suicidal army of once-infinitely-sad fans would be just the trick.

See you tomorrow. For a long time to come.

A Demo Event of Serious Consequence

Blockparty 2008 went so well, I'm going to spend an awful lot of time talking about it. I thought we couldn't easily top last year on so many fronts and yet we did. There is a lot of media out there and more coming, so let me quickly dump some links on you to get an idea of what we're talking about, and I will then go into some detail of aspects of this wild success over the next few entries.

Here's an album of photos I took of Notacon and Blockparty. It goes from just before the Friday events through to the last bit of awards show on Sunday. Many were taken by me and some by RaD Man.

I knew Trixter would deliver an amazing talk about preserving old demos. His presentation, "Self-Preservation Mode", is available on archive.org. Well worth the watch.

Trixter's project I've been raving about for months, MONOTONE, had a wonderful debut for the audience. Be sure to check out the second song!

The Fat Man's full talk will be out there soon, but until then we have the introduction from his talk out there.

My talk on the art and theory of editing in life and in media, Now and Then, Here and There, is also uploaded to archive.org. I expect most of the Blockparty talks will get this treatment.

A demoparty's about the releases, of course, so the results list will be of interest to many, although I still have to build in the links to the results subdirectory. Feel free to root around, of course.

The demos are now part of the Pouet site, which means it's now subjected to the same knockaround and playful criticism anything else gets on there. It's been fun to watch the reactions.

We recorded hours of footage, so there's lots of media to get out there. In the meantime, I was impressed with this montage put together by an attendee.

I was blown away by this event. Look forward to more verbiage than you would ever want.

Twilight of the Area Code Master

We know (or at least I hope we do) that skills once considered vital will eventually fall out of favor. Stuff that you could do well, maybe better than anyone you knew, eventually becomes something that has no opportunity for any use. Heartbreaking, I know. What's worse is when it's less a case of you not having the skill anymore because you're too old, but because the world has shifted such that this skill has no relevance. Then you feel really old.

When one had a modem, you ended up calling a lot of places to get messages. You'd type in or dial some phone numbers, and then go to a BBS in that area. If you were paying for these long data-carrying calls, you'd probably not call much out of your area code. But if you were grabbing phone calls for free, like I was, then you'd be calling all over the country. And I did, with call counts in the thousands over the years.

So way back in my teens, I could tell you where an area code was. All of them. Tell me 404 and I'll say Georgia, say 914 and that's New York, 312 is Chicago, 206 is Washington. I'd see a phone number and I'd know where it was. If it was in my home area code, I'd see the first six numbers and know what town it was in.

The knowledge was forced into my head, like someone who walks the same path every day might memorize all the rocks along the side of the path or know the names on every mailbox. I called so many places, in so many states, that I just kind of knew them all by heart.

It helped a lot that there weren't as many then. Area codes still had to conform to a rule that the first number was between 2 and 9, the second a 0 or 1, and the third 1-9. 305 (Florida) was obviously an area code. 230 was a typo. (Probably 203, Connecticut). You latched onto the pattern and there we went.

Area code splits have been around for a long time, with the first one happening a year after the creation of area codes in 1947. Before area codes, of course, you needed people; you'd call up and get an operator and they'd connect your call. Once machines got into the end-to-end, social misfits need never speak with a person; which was good if you were stealing the phone call. But the real area code splits of initial interest had all settled down by the 1980s and were somewhat rare. And each one begat another in the same realm: [2-9][01][1-9] as they say in regular expressions.

I should hasten for the benefit of phone nerds that there were, of course, area codes like 710 and 310, but they weren't for the places one would call with BBSes. And yes, there was 800 and 900 and even my beloved 700, but again, these weren't for locations; they were crazy mysterious places far outside the realm of reason. So this talent was able to keep up through the 1980s with no issue.

Once caller ID became more frequent, I could glance at it and see who was calling me. I'd see a 818 and know it was California or 503 and know it was Oregon and make choices based on that. This talent was kind of innate, there, just something I had.

But then things got weird.

510 in 1991 ruined things. A California area code, it broke the magic formula. Luckily, these were few and far between, like 410 when it popped up in Maryland a couple years later. I adjusted. But by this time I was in my 20s and I was making a lot less phone calls than I had in the BBS era. I was on the Internet now.

In 1995, 334 broke it for good. An area code for Alabama, the magic formula was gone. It scanned as an exchange for me, as it did for a lot of switching equipment. It might be hard to imagine now for the younger set, but there was a time when this actually cut off parts of the country. Older switching systems (especially ones inside schools or businesses) couldn't call these numbers. It broke them utterly. Phone switches were thrown out or finally upgraded by the truckload. Now that there were tons of crappy telecommunications vendors, upgrades to these systems were fast and furious. And my skills became less and less useful, although the older businesses, ones that had had numbers for many years, still made sense to me and when someone called from 505, I knew it was New Mexico.

Recently, though, two things have happened.

First of all, numbers are portable. I have switched my phone with three providers and kept the numbers. Many others have too. You can be calling a number that the person answering won't even be in the same state as where the number "should" be. They've jumped around and ended up somewhere other than the natural resting place of the number, and that's that.

And the final nail has been the addition of voice over IP. When you use this, your phone is hooked to your computer. For many people, they have an inward number, but when you call, it uses the nearest geographic "place" to where you're calling. So, to the person getting the call, your number is totally different from where you are. This is happening more and more. What's interesting is how all these companies with clever number-scanners that allow them to make decisions based on the callers location are now broken. I've used VOIP phones and been hailed from Syracuse, or given California directions, or so on. The times have truly passed me by.

Once I could stand there and recite these numbers and their locations with the greatest pride. They were my geography teacher and my sage-like awareness of the lands around me. But those times are gone.

I wonder what other skills I've lost, time having passed them so completely I've forgotten about them. I'll alert you if I remember.

FORUM REFEREE!

For reasons that nobody cares about, I was sent two companion threads, one closed and the other basically so, regarding the release of an Atari 2600 cartridge. This is interesting in itself to some people, but in fact I'm more fascinated by the body of it and where things went wrong. And things did go wrong! A discussion announcing the availability of a new rendition of a 20+ year old Atari 2600 program quickly turned into a free-for-all and was closed. Then, a week and change later, a reference to this thread was made in another forum and even more vitrol occurred.

I am an objective observer, and a student of the discussion thread and its myriad implementations. Let's consider then, what the hell happened.

Here's thread #1:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=123594

My summary of the subject matter is this: Rob Fulop, an established and historical figure in Atari history, announces that he is looking for input for the price of a limited edition Atari 2600 cartridge he has made of a game he worked on in the 1980s called "Actionauts". Here's that message:

 I'm about to release a new 2600 cart - Actionauts. I have no idea how much such a
 thing is 'worth' in the Atari 2600 collector's marketplace. What I know are the
 following two facts.
  
 1) I've released a game into this community before. The name of the game was
 Cubicolor,  and I released it almost 20 years ago. At the time, I had no idea what
 to charge for the game, so I picked $50 pretty much out of the blue sky. The
 fifty available copies sold out pretty fast. Today the sale price for one of these
 games hovers around $1,000. OK, personally I think this is sort of a high price
 for a game unworthy of release at the time it was made, but who am I to know
 how these things work. For whatever reason, the 2600 collector community
 has decided a Cubicolor is worth $1,000. Regardless, I think it's a fair statement
 that I certainly didn't get the better end of THAT particular transaction!
  
 Suffice it to say the $50 is probably below the price of what an Actionauts cart is 'worth'.
  
 2) I do know what the COST is for Actionauts to exist. The game took about
 3.5 months of my time to make in the first place. Then it took about 1.5 month
 of time to make it available ... figuring how much time it took to make 300 copies,
 design boxes and labels, figure out how to take and fulfill orders, etc. And then
 it cost about $5,000 in hard cash to build the 300 carts, print the boxes and labels,
 etc. So the "cost" of Actionauts is $5,000 + five months of my time. Such is the
 real cost of making the game available to this marketplace.
  
 Since nobody knows the real "value" of the game, all I can go by is the cost
 of making the game. Which comes down to what is a fair "wage" for me to
 earn here? How much is five months of my time worth? I'd like this community
 to help answer this question, before I put a price tag on the game.
 Once the community has designated what they think a reasonable "wage" is
 for somebody like myself .. and I concur ... I will use the following formula to
 establish the price for the game. (5 * (monthly wage) + 5000) / 300. In the
 interests of this community, I think it would be wrong to attach any sort of
 profit to this price. Thus I'm asking people to be fair and reasonable in the
 poll questions, and not answer the questions from a purely self interest.
  
 Thanks

The Numbers

The thread begins on Monday, March 31, 2008, at 4:22 PM. It is closed on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 1:01 PM, for a total lifespan of roughly 45 hours. It contains 198 posts, or an average of about 5 posts an hour. Of these, 40 of them are by the thread originator and main subject, Rob Fulop. Of the 62 participants, 30 post just one message.

Already, there's an obvious imbalance or unique aspect here: the conversation is Rob Fulop (that big blue slice) posting an amount equivalent to at least 30+ other participants. Taken another way, he posts messages frequently and in response to others, all the way through to the end of the 45 hour period. Being that this post is about soliciting questions, the warning sign is that Fulop does not in fact merely post a question (and related poll); he immediately and consistently engages the posters in debate and discussion.

The problem with a "what do you think about this", or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it's all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.

A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it's the way it is.

So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually "breathe" in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves. With this in consideration, here is a different observation of the posting metric: the number of posts per hour across the 45 hour period:

The "breathing" of the forum discussions becomes more clear with this view. We see the usual flurry of initial response and activity of a healthy thread, which then reverberates in a more quiet fashion for a while before it all flares up again, followed by the same reverberation, and then a small up-ramp at the end that is cut off by the thread closure.

Not surprisingly, that second flare-up is caused by a post by Fulop. So let's address the content.

The Content

As mentioned above, this thread is ostensibly about the future release of an Atari 2600 cartridge and the suggested price points by the "community". It is a question posed by the cartridge's creator, a man of strong pedigree and historical credit named Rob Fulop. Once an Atari engineer, he is a co-founder of Imagic, a third-party maker of Atari 2600 cartridges, which ultimately shut down. He has his name in a good amount of productions throughout the years. He is, in other words, the Real Deal.

In his poll, he asks two questions: Should the author of a new 2600 release be paid for their time spent? and What is a reasonable monthly salary for a 2600 designer to earn? Since the title of the thread is "Actionauts price tag?", we run into another problem: the poll is not related to the question. The question should have been "how much would you pay for the following item" followed by "what is important to you in buying a package like this". These are the questions one would reasonably expect.

Within the first fifteen minutes of the thread, a user named Mirage1972 answers the poll (which is anonymous) and then writes this message:

 I voted $2000/month, but I wanted to say that that's
 not what I really think the programmer's time is
 "worth". It's  "worth" a lot more. It just has to be balanced
 with what people can and will pay.  Also factor in that anyone
 choosing to program and release a 2600 game in the
 21st century should be doing it primarily because they
 "want" to, or, in other words, for intangible benefits.
 
 I don't think it's possible for you to be paid as much
 as you (or any other 2600 programmer)
 should get, or as much as I would "like" to pay you.
 
 Now that I think of it, $2000/month with your calculation
 works out to $50/cart (with box/manual).  That should be
 the low end of what you charge, probably. I'd say $50-$65
 would be fair, and  you'd easily sell out at that price.
 Realistically, you'd probably sell out at $100 each, some
 people  just wouldn't be able to buy them. But, that's the
 breaks I guess.

Mirage's response is informative, helpful, complimentary, and even does some basic research to accompany his opinion.

Almost immediately, Fulop responds:

 You do realize, that you are suggesting that a 2600 programmer,
 one with reasonable credentials, should expect this community to
 pay them no more for their time then they could earn as an
 assistant manager at Jack in the Box, right? Maybe you are
 right, and such is how this community truly values people like
 myself ... I guess we will see based on the result of the poll!

FOUL! Here we see the roots of the problem: Fulop takes Mirage's statement and throws it back into his face, implying not only that Mirage has degraded his skills and dismissed his efforts, but that he considers his time equivalent to a fast food restaurant's "assistant" manager. Note how this is all crafted; the $2k/month figure was one of the original (poorly chosen) poll questions; Mirage simply selected it. It turns out that Rob conisders some of the potential poll questions wrong. This is not how polls work; you poll people to get answers. That people might answer incorrectly with regards to objective knowledge is not the issue; with a poll, you realize there's a problem (too many US citizens can't find Australia on a map) and you then use this information to create a counter-campaign. (More geography lessons; make Australian tourism commercials include graphical representation of Australia's location on a globe, etc.). If the poll-taker immediately turns around in the same public forum, and implies that he is personally insulted by the answer, then the poll is no longer relevant and certainly not objective. Additionally, he takes the answer from a single responder on a single thread on a single site and immediately indicates that "[this] is how this community truly values people like myself". Now we have a double-edged sword: the "community" has been accused of sub-par character quality, and the poster has indicated he considers himself very important/worthy, a problematic non-humble position not sure to win favor.

Fulop quickly falls in love with the Jack in the Box slur; he uses it multiple times in his subsequent postings:

• What I'm getting out of this conversation is "about the same as our society values an assistant manager at Jack In The Box" .. which puts it into perspective nicely.
• These guys basically are saying I should earn less doing this then i would earn as assistant manager at Jack in the Box .. my view .. these guys aren't going to be interested at any price .. and even then .. they will weep that the game isn't as good as Pitfall. So the low votes don't count especially given the discussion surrounding their justifications.

The insults don't stop there. Fulop quickly takes his own thread downhill as fast as his fingers can conjure the words.

• To be told by people in this community that the think my time is worth $2k per month .. is sort of weird, actually. I mean, in the same breath, the person who says this can't seriously tell me how much of a "fan" they are of my work, right?
• I certainly understand that this market is small, and unable to compensate people like myself for the effort involved. Thus there are very few new releases. This makes sense. But it's really weird to me that you use the term 'profit greatly' when talking about somebody asking $4k a month for their time. How much do you charge for yours?

In these cases, landmines are being laid, landmines ensuring someone will come along and trip on them.

The second-flareup is interesting; it concerns what represents a living wage.

Specifically, Fulop takes umbrage with the "$2k/month" atari developer wage, the idea that he should only make $24k a year. In fact, it's easy to interpret this poll question many ways; what's a good wage to make doing atari carts in your spare time? What's a good wage to make with atari cartridges after you've done all the work and am collecting new items? But it turns out the secret answer was that Fulop was asking how much poll responders thought any Atari 2600 Developer should make in toto in a given year while working full-time in that sole capacity. When he then indicates that $4k/month would barely be a living wage (this is $52k a year), then cultural issues come into play.

For some locations, $52k is a princely sum, while in others it can't support an apartment, much less food and transportation. Within Fulop's position (and he is a man well along in years, having been involved in this industry well beyond a quarter century), it is entirely possible that $52k can't possibly support a healthy lifestyle and living wage; but this was not asked in the poll and is not the point given in the poll. What starts as a simple question about the price of a cartridge becomes a man's last stand of sanity against an onslaught of cartridge collecting zombies, firing randomly into the sea of grabbing hands to protect his livelihood.

Much of the thread, then, is meta; people defending Rob Fulop's talents (which are not in question), people discussing a living wage and what that means, people discussing where everything went so wrong in the thread, and people defending other people's positions as various sides are taken. A parallel conversation occurs as to the definitions of "gamer" and "collector"; Fulop sees them as distinct and disparate groups, while others see more of a grey area or spectrum. This discussion muddies at the core level from that point on, until Fulop throws up his hands and requests the thread end; he's gotten what he 'came for', although it is not entirely clear how he could have possibly achieved this.

Ten days later, on another web forum, a new thread begins, starting with the pricing of the cartridge and disagreement on the price. This brings the players back into the same fight again, the one that should have never happened in the first place, based on a poll question that was poorly asked and poorly discussed afterwards, and a range of insults and finger-pointing that naturally come from this discordant, foolish melee.

Conclusion

Forum Referee rules that Rob Fulop is a very talented man who is also a dope. Seeking assistance in pricing a product does not give you slack to insult anyone who takes the time to give their answers. Twisting around words and then throwing them back at faces, indicating insult where there is none, and giving your poll answerers a total of 30 minutes before you jump in and start swinging indicates what the kids call a "total n00b". Unsportsmanlike Conduct!

Stay off the forums and do your good work when time and money permit.

Not Free Enough

A word of warning. This is about content license issues. These entries are always classic, in the way that the Hindenburg Disaster was "classic". Go ahead at own risk.

An interesting situation occurred recently in my mail. I had a customer buy my BBS Documentary, and then write a nice fan mail letter, followed by, "If your next documentary is freely licensed, then please put me on the notification list".

He included a link. This link, in fact. This was, in other words, his definition of "Free". It's very convenient we can do this now, just point somewhere and go "this is what I mean".

After spending a little while at that site, I sadly had to decide not to put his name on the notification list.

GET LAMP is not going to be Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike. It'll be Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0. The reason's pretty simple: I have a number of musicians involved who do not wish the music to be easily placeable on commercially sold compilations. I want to use their music. So I am distributing this work under this license.

Personally, I saw no issue with this, and really still don't. My stuff, my choice. I have people I respect who are being kind enough to provide all the material they are, and they are letting me release it under this license, and we'll all by a happy little can of Clamato juice. Under the license it's being released under, you can throw out huge swaths of the movie, add your own commentary and distribute it, dupe copies or even torrent it, and generally have your way about it. You just can't sell it or profit by it.

I had forgotten, of course, how divided certain aspects of the license community are about these things. Maybe that was a good thing. I have enough trouble trying to explain to people who don't care about this that yes, they're allowed to show my movie to their classes without paying, and yes, they can have showings of it and not pay me, and yes, they can take excerpts of it and put it online all remixed up. I appreciate being asked but they don't really need to. I understand fully what I did when I went Creative Commons, so the repercussions don't shock me. (I'm not this lucky in all aspects of my life, but with this, I pretty much knew cold what I am saying when I use these licenses).

But man, what fun little internal battles. The website I was linked to contains a very specific article, directly geared to the general thesis, that thesis being: If you license with a NonCommercial Creative Commons License, you are a Fuck.

The whole site is a Wiki, albeit the kind I prefer, with logins required to mess around with them, and a way to link to a specific revision, as I did above. What's not directly clear unless you look at it is the whole thing's run by Erik Moller (sic; I can't use his properly spelled last name because it breaks the livejournal rss feed to my weblog). You probably don't know who Erik is. All well and good. If you've studied Wikipedia's internal processes, then you know exactly who he is. He's about as insider to the Wikipedia "cabal" as you can basically get; one of the all-time apologist characters for its failings and abuses. He recently got Konami-Coded into the higher echelons of the non-profit, and I think that's about all I'll discuss about Erik. All I'm saying here is he's one of the proponents of a manner of thinking I don't necessarily hop into the haystack with, spouting glee. Let's get back to the writing instead of the man.

The writing is filled with a lot of that spectacular sleight of hand I've come to hate from groups whose general stated purposes sound really wonderful and then you flip over the rock and are horrified. It describes all the reasons you didn't think your Subtle Plan all the way through before going with the NC version of the Creative Commons license, and you should drop the NC. Here's one that's particularly awesome:

"One final factor to keep in mind, especially for wide-spread small scale exploitation, is the enforceability of the license. For example, even a generous interpretation of Wikipedia's GNU Free Documentation License requires that content users link back to Wikipedia and the article history, and point out that the document is freely licensed.1 As is evident from a brief look at Wikipedia's own list of mirrors and forks by compliance, many content mirrors completely ignore the GFDL. Some even systematically remove all evidence that the content is from Wikipedia. Such behavior, while illegal, is difficult to punish, as mirrors reside in many different countries. Many have been quickly set up, without anyone in charge of operations. Even though Wikipedia is a large community with a reasonably well-funded parent organization, it is clear that it is hard to enforce even very basic licensing requirements on free content. Ask yourself whether you are truly willing and able to enforce violations of an -NC license. Otherwise, the only people you punish with the restriction are those who are careful to respect your wishes -- people who are likely to be amenable to friendly cooperation anyway."

Read it again, or feel free to hear my interpretation of what he says there: There's no point in putting a non-commercial restriction on your work, because everyone's going to ignore you anyway. Damn, that's a pimp-slap for you, isn't it. The reason you should license your stuff for the most accessible and widespread distribution is because you, content-boy, are going to get gang-banged against the hordes of users out there, and at least this way you get a free dinner. Sign. Me. Up.

The essay is chock full of some of these winner statements. One indicates that doing this only hurts the little guy. The little newspapers, the small websites, the mom-and-pops of the world who just want to get the biggest benefit of your hard work without opening them to legal liability. It's about as logical as a drug user explaining why the reason he has to sell your toaster for more meth is to gear the two of you towards a better tomorrow, that is, one where he won't have to harvest your organs.

But instead of filling your screen with a point-by-point breakdown of where I don't jibe with Erik's disagreement, I'd like to get to the interesting stronger issue here.

I don't often compromise. I am an intractable asshole when it comes to certain things, aspects, and so on. Believe me, more than once I have screwed myself in a fireworks-and-brass-band fashion over a point. Other times I stand ground on stuff that likely means little to anyone who is not, generally, me. Some offhand examples: I refuse to watch Hogan's Heroes. There's a pizza place a couple blocks from my house that I won't go to because I was once left waiting for 25 minutes for someone to take my order. I won't buy Sony products at all, with the exception of my video editing software. This goes on for page after embarassing page. Been there. Haggled over that. Screamed and moved on.

But somehow it still burns my bacon when I see people informing me, or others like me, how we are doing the wrong thing, a disservice, by not making the stuff we generate distributable in some way. It trip-traps over the troll bridge into somewhere I don't find very pleasant, or enjoyable. It says, basically, way down there. "Thanks. Gimmie." It makes me feel like someone's tugging my pant leg. I don't like it at all.

And on top of it, we have my little fan, so happy with my first film, laying down his gauntlet of what he thinks a film must be and basically shutting himself out of my next one because it has a license restriction on it. A license restriction that, I'm sorry, I can't see being a huge deal. Yes, unlike the last time, the schools in question would have to call me if they decide to charge admission to see my film, permission I will give. And if someone wants to have a bake sale and sell dupes of my disc, huzzah. Pick up the goddamn phone and chat with me. Is that so hard?

It comes down to this: while in many cases, I have happily allowed stuff I've created or assembled to join the Big Happy Shitball, this does not mean I have, by default, considered this to be the be-all end-all final answer for all future creations. Just because people "can" copy it and will ignore whatever license I put on it, Erik, does not mean that I have to automatically make it easy for them to do so in contradiction of my collaborators' wishes. We do that, when we work together, you see; focus on the good we're doing, instead of sneering into our soup when we don't get it all handed to us on a silver platter with the words "E Pluribus Unum" etched on it.

Oh, well. Maybe next time, big fan.

A Quick Recommendation: Dad Hacker

Sometimes I find someone weblogging who in fact is holding some very unique knowledge. One of the recent such discoveries made aware to me by a gabillion links is that of Dad Hacker, the weblog of Landon Dyer. Landon worked for Atari and later Apple and a bunch of other concerns, but for the moment it's his very occasional entries about working at Atari and on Atari projects that's holding my interest. His weblog goes back six years and is of a wide variety of subjects, so it's not like he just started down this road.

Like my own little site, one specific post has gotten a lot of attention, and fans have now clung on awaiting further similar pearls to arrive. In his case, it's Donkey Kong and Me, which is worth the price of admission and much much more. It brings to mind some of the stories of Sinistar, but this narrative of Dyer's is very personal and very technically specific as he works through his project.

Before you particularly strong-memoried folks jump down his throat, this is about the Atari 8-bit version, not the Atari 2600 version. Just so we're all clear here.

If you browse through his back archives, very little is about his days of Atari, but the few that are more than make up for it. I hope he continues to dig deeper. Until then, enjoy the handful of worthwhile essays of someone on the ground in the hand-hacking of a classic work.

April Tool's Day

By now a lot of what we consider the world-wide-web's most popular destinations combine into one big social club, with a good number of trendmakers and pundits whose opinions represent the general consensus. Occasionally we disagree with them or vehemently agree, but woe to us who go against the grain.

That said, I find myself agreeing with two positions that the opinion captains are steering around.

The first is the idea that the April Fool's Day Web Prank is perhaps rife for "you're doing it wrong" type mishap. People do tend to see what others are doing and implement, clumsily, the same general ideas, so we have an awful lot of upside-down logos, "special announcements" that something completely crazy has happened, or statements of changes or terrifying outcomes that are not, ultimately, true. Even more important than the natural distaste for shallow copycatting of the "I am being hilarious" prank is that the natural of information duplication now means that insane statements done in the name of April Fool Comedy are joining streams of information far away from the original sources, leading to problematic and needless confusion, and not of the "oh you sure got me" variety. If the hilarity to mishap/blandness ratio is high, then I'm all for it, but I can't help but feel we're getting heavily toward 1:1 as the years go on and we celebrate our little web holidays.

The second position is a proposal: instead of utilizing April 1st as a day for hilarious non-hilarity, instead use it to announce site-changing or vision-changing creations. Whereas you would normally provide people with a claim that you were moving to China to work in a gold farming boiler room, instead announce that you're engaged. Instead of claiming to be able to send your pets into space, announce a program you've been tinkering with for months that nobody would believe could actually be that cool and exist.

In other words, turn April Fool's Day into Surprise Announcement Day.

April's a nice month, far away from the end of year holidays, not quite to the summer's dullness and warmth, rife with opportunity to brighten the growing days with something really amazing that you did. You tinker and slave away in darkness, and then spring onto the world your showpiece, something that makes all work stop and days of playtime commence as your newest fans explore the gift you've given them.

There are examples of this already. I hope there will be more.

I am a tiny, wavering light in the wilderness of opinion, and my idea is not original, but I can certainly hope it might catch on for 2009.

April Fool

April 1st is essentially ruined for any serious discussions or essays; everyone thinks you're playing a joke, or you're not getting into the spirit of it all. So here's a photo of me directing MC Frontalot. I'll swing back by tomorrow.