ASCII by Jason Scott

Engagements

I am speaking at DEFCON this year. It'll be about text adventures, my documentary, and hopefully some example footage from the new film. That's in August. No idea what day within that, and more than once the day/time's been changed in the program, then changed once more. So not much details other than it'll be in Las Vegas. See you there.

I've decided not to propose a talk to HOPE, even if it's the last one, as they claim. I can't think of anything good for that crowd (Saving Digital History from 4 years ago was probably one of the best speeches I gave, and that was at HOPE) and I waited too long to submit. So consider me a civilian, although I'm supposedly one of the interviewees or DJs for the radio station they're running there. I'll see you around.

I spoke at Penguicon, Notacon, and ROFLcon this year, so I can't complain about public exposure. My "Before the LOL" talk has now been downloaded 4,500 times from its archive.org page, so it's been a pretty good year for me.

I've got some late-year possibilities brewing as well.

Money's at an all-time low while I gear up for the post-production of my film, so my ability to just jaunt around is going to be restricted. I won't shut up in this weblog, though!

Escaping The Escapist

Recently, Escapist Magazine won one of those most chummy of awards, the Webby. I can't pretend to know the exact manner and approach the "Webbys" take to choosing the winner of each set of candidates, but no doubt votes and cries from the web-browsing public are somewhat involved.

I will contend that the reason for Escapist's victory in these awards is due to one thing only: Zero Punctuation. I will go even further than that, to make it clear that the only reason The Escapist exists for many people is as a shipping container for Zero Punctuation, requiring it to merely not damage its precious contents on a weekly basis. More on this shortly.

This situation, where this website is a forgettable bunch of shredded newspapers used as padding for a golden egg of criticism freshly arrived from Australia, wasn't always the case. A mere three years ago or so, PDFs appeared at this new site called The Escapist, and it was, while not without predecessors, a real splash of a magazine.

The layouts, both on the website and in the PDF format, were distinctive. At a time when gaming websites became more and more screaming, blinking billboards, breathlessly regurgitating press releases and screenshots provided for them by game company mechanisms, the Escapist was almost a calm Gibraltar rising above others with its calm lines and clear writing.

It may seem odd to call back a mere 3 years as being ancient history, but this is the nature of gaming magazines, which are truly and completely some of the proudest whores on the street corner of publishing, not just aware of their shallowness and proximity to corruption, but prone to wallow in it frequently. Occasionally, a writer or editor will bleat out a "but we want to be honest to the fans" editorial, mostly due to being caught out in yet another new and spectacular way they have sold out, a way previously unknown but quickly becoming an "industry standard" as if the fact that "everybody does it" washes it clean of moral decay. Month to month, it's the little jabs, the shifted size of advertisements, the addition of "skins" to utterly sell out to a soon-forgotten product. Within a year you do not even notice the slide having gone so far, and the "controversy" raging is merely a slight disagreement on a point of procedure in a depth previously thought unthinkable.

Such a surprise were these magazines, these PDF-downloadable versions of an interesting layout, that I started to collect them. I would pull down these self-contained magazines and sock them away on my website, considering them a worthwhile addition to my archives. Strictly speaking, this magazine was more a "zine" than anything else; they were relatively small issues and the layout allowed for only the lightest of overviews of the subjects at hand. But they were free, and pretty, and I couldn't argue that for a zine it was a very very nice zine. The first issue was an anaemic seventeen pages, but there were no advertisements and who could really argue with that.

The zine was also weekly, which may seem like forever in website output but in fact harkened to a simpler time and approach. You can fill your news site with "content" by merely raping every RSS feed around you, ending up with a scrolling set of text showing how absolutely on top of it and awesome your crack staff is. (Naturally, this monoculture means that if one site falls prey to a hoax or a misprint, all the sites do, but that's why they make the words "Ooops, our bad".) To step back, to request essays and musings on subjects both recent and stale gave this zine a particularly classy air.

Note, please, that I'm not saying this work was uniformly excellent. It just presented what it did have in an excellent form that showed effort, talent and clarity of vision. The actual article quality itself is generally outside my realm, because what I want and like differs from others and so on; I can attest, however, that for the price and the availability, I was a delighted, satisfied customer.

A highlight relevant to my own interest is issue number 55 which contains the article/essay "The Short, Happy Life of Infocom" by Lara Crigger. The article is non-distinct, possibly cribbed from the MIT Business Case Study "Down from the Top of Its Game". But it is pretty, and laid out nicely, which is more than one could say for a lot of other articles on the subject on web pages. The issue contains other pleasant articles, typical for Escapist's approach: an overview of game theorist Raph Koster, an interview with John Romero, a pseudonym-laden overview of a game company falling over, and an overview of The Sims Online, defined as "the 20 million dollar failure". Again, no ads pollute this work, the 55th weekly edition of the zine.

Naturally, this could not continue forever.

Issue #104 is the last issue produced until this old paradigm. Continuing the tradition of being relatively small (a mere 21 pages), its articles are a blend of game review and theory, with a public service page (making it 20 pages, really) and a cross-property advertisement for a sister publication owned by the same parent firm.

I have collected the sum of the released issues for you, as they became harder and harder to find on the site itself. I'm sure they're still buried in there, but it's not worth the effort. I have all 104. (My mirrors do too, should you find my connection slow.)

As I have implied, this short and delightful party came to an end.

In June of 2007, Escapist magazine editor Julianne "Andraste" Greer merrily announced that they would no longer be providing the magazine in the PDF form and layout. The congratulations and accolades quickly faded to be replaced with discontentment and disenchantment at how things had devolved into a look utterly without distinction or usefulness. Art director Jon "Landslide" Hayter, in a tone not outside of a waitress apologizing that the pancake house was out of pancakes, said the old approach had been too "time and man-power intensive" and so while they were sad to see it go, they were not bringing it back in favor of being available in more platforms.

Greer showed surprise that people would be up in arms or dismayed by the change. As the person who founded the endeavor, she appeared to have even forgotten her own history, when this little effort showed some quality beyond the usual tripe.

I wrote off The Escapist then, as I'm sure many did. And then Zero Punctuation happened, and I swear that it took me a while before I even connected the two, the place holding this wonderful little creation and that PDF-based zine that I once enjoyed glancing through less than a year earlier. Once I did, I was pleased that there was an excuse to stop by, even though I had no overarching need to browse the rest of the site.

Within a short time, even Zero Punctuation was corrupted. Until very recently (this week), when you brought up the animation, a little window within the animation would blow an ad into your face like a spitwad. If you take no action, it sat there for the entire length of the presentation, a hubris even network television and youtube won't exhibit. You could "close" it, but it merely sat there, a closed line that your mind had to try and ignore, waiting for the opportunity to spring back out again. It is a moral compass for this modern Escapist that something as pleasant as a column could be overlaid with yet another worthless, generic ad for something I don't have an urge to play, with yet another cover portraying someone or something holding a weapon. The true irony is how this ad is overlaid on a column/presentation that skewers this very same lameness.

The layout for Zero Punctuation changed again recently, removing this ad, and I am sure it is some methodology to increase the exposure to advertisements. In any given shift of action, I assume it is to further ad revenue. It is the beginning, the middle, and the end of this culture's literary output, with only the style and depth of intrusion of the various methodologies changing.

I am sure the creators of the Escapist might feel the need to stop by and explain to me, utilizing some unknown quantity and justification, why the choices had to be made and why they decided that being like every other rag online and off was a brilliant move. I am not overly interested in this explanation, much as I would be uninterested in the explanation handed to me by a prostitute, readjusting her short skirt, justifying the actions taken for fifty dollars, a hot shower and a place out of the rain.

How It Goes

It goes like this.

Outside of my health, I have to maintain items in three realms: data, physical, and mental.

In the realm of data, that's things like e-mail, files, disk drives, sets, and the arrangement of these therein. I might have an inbox that makes your eyes water or a pair of terabyte hard drives in need of synchronization, or maybe it's something as simple as knowing which bookmarks should really be deleted or grouped together. Since it's not inherently obvious when you're sitting around, it's quite easy to forget about it until you go deep into a directory and go "oh".

The realm of physical stuff is more obvious. It's piles of papers waiting to be scanned, or disks donated from kind folks. CD-ROMs stacked in a corner, awaiting addition to cd.textfiles.com, or a pile of books I bought online because they were vaguely rare. In a corner is a hand-built Russian computer I bought at auction and I also have a sizeable collection of hats. The office looks like something exploded, or I went out of business. This is the most obvious, and therefore the most irritating of realms.

The third is the mental bit, keeping track of what I know and what I should be focusing on, making sure the poor little thinky-sac isn't being abused, and taking care of it with sleep and not getting split across too much work. I don't do this so well sometimes, but if I fail at it you'll know it because I'll go completely off my rocker. Current status: not off my rocker.

Some of these issues and projects produce very little you immediately notice. For example, I recently took a CD-ROM sent to me by the creator of Radio Freek America, an enjoyable hacker radio show that enjoyed a couple years of success, and added it to the directory. I already had all the shows, but these are the original high-fidelity recordings, which were not available at the time because of bandwidth and storage issues. I have less of these issues than RFA did, so now they're available to the world. It takes a while to shove 2 gigabytes of audio data into a directory, so that went on in the background. It's a subset of the original (only some episodes were recovered in this fashion) and it the whole thing could use a nice going over to look better and provide more context, but at least it got somewhere.

Similarly, I've been burning a lot of DVD-ROMs. A LOT of DVD-ROMs. I can't stress "lot" here enough. When I interview people with the new camera, it produces about 4gb of data every 10 minutes. This data has no tape backup like Mini-DV did. This is good in the context of now we're in the spectacular flying car future, but it's not so good when you realize that you're putting all your data on spinning plates and little burned pieces of plastic and hoping it will survive. It won't survive all that long, or at least the vectors for losing it are significant. So, I store the data in either 9 or 4 places. If it's shown to be critical to my movie, it ends up on two DVD-ROMs, three hard drives of clips, two raw footage hard drives, and two more DVD-ROMs for raw data. If it's not, it ends up being on just the two hard drives and the two DVD-ROMs. This comes down, when I'm working with the raw data, to putting it on two DVD-ROMs, then deleting it from the "to go to DVD-ROM" section. This sounds like a lot of work. It is. It sounds tedious and on the edge of requiring human interaction. It is. It sounds like I need an intern. I do, but I don't want to pay for an intern. So this goes on in the background, all the time. I have, wait for it... tons of DVD-ROM binders containing this backup material. I have stacks of storage hard drives for the footage.

Some work is fractal. Actually, all work is fractal but I mean that some is very obviously fractal, even before I dive into it and discover it's fractal. An example is a CD-ROM. I could take the contents and dump it on cd.textfiles.com, but a lot of times the CD will have data of use to another project, like bbs.textfiles.com; the right thing to do is to pull the BBS lists out and add their data to the BBS list, and similarly pull out artpacks of ANSI groups and see if someone by luck grabbed a version of an artpack heretofore unseen. It does happen... some of these CD-ROM groups were unstoppable in desperately trying to get new data in to claim that this quarter's 600 metabytes of BBS shareware was "all new". So some amazing stuff gets sucked up in these, and I need time to go through them. That time hasn't completely come yet.

Scanning is a low priority. Benj Edwards, the little mynx, has time to add a new retro ad a week but I'm really strapped for time and setting up for scanning is one of those all-day things for me, because I'd like to jam out a hundred or more pages at a sitting, at least. I have stacks of stuff in the office waiting for a scan before being permanently bagged and tagged, but they'll have to wait a bit longer. Until then, they sit in the office taking space and piles of that stuff was starting to take things over. So now they're rearranged. This is quite a way to spend a holiday weekend.

I had stacks of DVDs in here (standard DVDs, although some are amateur productions with hand-made DVDs). I've now started taking out DVDs I've seen, which will go elsewhere in my home, leaving just the once I haven't, meaning it will go from a proud collection of DVD spines to a massive to-do pile.

I finally hung up the nice ANSI artwork displayer from the ANSI Art Gallery showing. It's not connected to a monitor but it certainly looks like it has the potential to observe and kill you. And with it on the wall, that means it's off the floor.

This is likely rather dull to hear about. I mention it because there's the glamor bit (and it really is sort of glamor) that people get to see of my work: the archives, the browsable entities, the movies, the photo collections. But beneath all that is a lot of drudgery. A LOT of drudgery. An amount of drudgery that eats days and weeks and has little obvious advantage at the time but which rewards me months or years down the line. Some of it is to prove a point. Some of it is compulsion. A good percentage is because of some requirement that any other person would barely register as being in the realm of a requirement. It is, however, what I do, and I will continue doing it.

Looking around, I think it'll be for quite a time.

Last Health Update for a While

Surely, these health updates of mine are getting old and tired. Like me.

I should put a "is dead/not yet dead" status message somewhere and leave it at that. I don't have the will to add a current health status/statistic "widget" thing, either. Widgets, by the way, are a classic textbook example of someone not understanding internet technology enough to realize the outcome of their actions. Hey, I may be out of shape but I'm still critical and feisty.

My Wii Fit arrived on Wednesday and I've been playing with it. It's vicious. It also indicates I am obese according to my body weight and that I better play some fucking Wii Fit or I will die choking on my own neck. Wii Fit takes no friends, gives no quarter. Wii Fit is a machine that will run you into the ground. It insulted me for missing a day. It told me that I have no balance. And now I'm here with a few minutes of Wii Fit under my belt and I can attest to several things.

• Like a lot of Miyamoto's later creations, Wii Fit showers you with expansions and rewards as you play. It rewards you for getting a few minutes done every day. it rewards you for playing better. It rewards you for trying a variation of a game with a new offered variation. In the beginning, you feel like a guy just blowing through the expansions: hooray! I stood and didn't fall over! But I'm sure this is a plan that's proven to work, so they do it. (I felt the same way about Mario Galaxy, that snuggled you with gifts through the beginning and then it starts to give you the hate way down the line.)
• I had forgotten how little control I have over my own legs. 10 years of gout and kidney stones have removed my fine control; absolutely removed it. My mind and habits have adapted to "your legs suck" and so I had a blind spot about it, but this thing utterly shows me how much I've let them go.
• This is a beautifully designed piece of equipment. It is subtle, it is functional, it is clean. It goes nicely under my television when I'm not using it, and it doesn't seem out of place for anything. Combined with the wireless aspect, and how it constantly turns itself off when not used, it's just a great addition to the room.

I went through the orientation for my CPAP/Mask Breathy thing, and got a nice little model, and I have started sleeping with it. Right now probably 60-70 percent of my sleeping time is going on wearing it (this is normal, it takes some time to ramp up and sometimes I flop down for a nap without moving to put on the mask). I can't report any major differences yet, but now that little guy's on the job.

I am still on a pill regimen for blood acid level and blood pressure.

I still have my nice gym membership (and the Wii simply removes the "but the gym is closed" excuse).

So between all this, I have all the tools at my disposal to get in better health. I have no excuse. I also don't want to fill this weblog with much more "guess what I am working out and wearing a mask" entries unless there's either something enormously entertaining or if a few months down the like I look like a fashion model. Otherwise, just to let you know, I'm still chugging along that road and am vaguely planning for significant archival-doing time for the forseable future.

When I get hit by a truck six months from now, I intend to be in awesome shape.

Before the LOL Now Available

Apparently the full content of my talk I gave at ROFLcon, "Before the LOL", has become available. The collection of files provides a raw recording of my presentation. Here's a clickable jukebox that archive.org provides:

I suppose I could fill this entry with all sorts of additional commentary about what I was going for or the subjects I mentioned here, but I think I'll wait until people enjoy it on its own merits. Enjoy.

The Divided States

For today's prize, you get a free rough idea for a role-playing/strategy game. It comes with many bonuses, including the requirement to research if it hasn't already been done, the process of implementing a ruleset that's functional, and the years of refinement and marketing. It's foolproof!

Some time ago, and by some time ago I mean something like 7 years ago, a fellow named Brian Rossa and I were chatting and he (I will give him full credit) told me about this crazy what-if scenario.

What if, he said, there was this huge political event and all fifty of the United States broke up? Statism rules the day. Washington can go fuck themselves. They're just another little town, probably fought over by Maryland and Delaware and Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In fact, a lot of states are fighting. California needs water. Montana is finally free to stockpile nuclear weapons shucked from various missile sites. New York has the Niagara power generation and shuts Ohio the hell off. And so on.

First, there's the tangling issue of finding out who all these different states depend on, along with what strengths they have. Then there's the issue of assigning a structure to their interaction. Then you make it this big diplomacy game, utilizing real state statistics and aspects (their flags, their known nuclear capacity, their natural resources) and then you have a classic resource and military tactical game from that.

The name we had was "The Divided States of America" and the cover idea I had was a rendering of a toll booth saying "Welcome to New York" except it's been turned into a fortified military checkpoint. We had some additional components, including creating "maxi states" that were very balanced, in case only 3-4 people were playing (North Atlantia, Sunshine, Freedom's Journey... you know, fun names).

We probably threw this idea around for a couple years, bringing it up when we saw each other. But six years is too long. I call time out and throw it to the masses. Here's what stopped us:

• Tactical games are cool, but they're hard to design, especially if, like me and Brian, you don't know the full ins and outs of it. At a party of BU students, one was reasonably into tactical games and his cursory discussion of our ideas was quickly in the realm of head-spinningly complicated, accounting for conditions and traditions we simply lacked any knowledge of.
• I kind of prefer online games over paper and card games. Again, we're in the realm of coding and construction far beyond my knowledge, or Brian's.
• Just a lot of work generally. You really have to do a ton of research and look into a lot of statistics, and while that's cool (there's a flight simulator called X-Plane that utilizes real weather conditions and can integrate them into the game!) it's a big chunk of time I will never have.

So there we go, an idea Brian postulated and that I got excited over and which, maybe, you will find exciting and interesting enough to move forward on. Go ahead! Have an awesome time. As a bonus, let me know about this game having existed for 20 years and I was totally unaware of it.

Out of One, Many!

The Power Spot

A lot of interesting subjects or exploratory pathways reveal themselves in my projects or research, but not all can be handled at the time. Most certainly can't be explored to a great depth when they're more about contemporary social commentary; life certainly has enough of that piling up.

But during one interview back half a decade ago, an early employee of The Well used an interesting turn of phrase about people working at their computers. The exact phrase, in the process of talking about what might drive people to be aggressive online in ways they'd never be in person, was "This is their Power Spot."

The idea of a "Power Spot" was actually what I was sort of going for in my documentary interviews for the last film, where I wanted to show people in these wonderfully constructed worlds they'd set up for themselves around their computers. I had one of my own, and so did many of my friends. I think the best one that comes to mind for me was Ed Williams during his interview:

Ed was an absolutely wonderful interview, and he appears multiple times as a speaker of wisdom on issues of social behavior on BBSes and Fidonet and elsewhere. But for a moment, check out that kickass setup. It was in his living room, and he's in front of a beautiful construction of documentation, technology, and easy access. It's a throne, a center of communications he can interact with the world and keep track of stuff, and yet one quick 180 degree turn and he's back in his regular home life, with his daughters and wife. If you sneak a glance over to this photo you can also see that there's an opening to the left and above to the kitchen, enabling conversation or passing of food as needed. It was a great setup.

Stripped of the narrative, here's additional such desks I encountered during my movie:

These are, like I said, places unto themselves. They breathe and live according to their owners, and are essentially sizable pipe organs from which to communicate or create towards a separate idea of "outwards". They are the castles built to house the thinking and creating aspects of the computer user, as they face into a corner or a wall, with the potential to lock themselves away from any distractions they wish to not have.

Some of this is a necessity. The machines, even the more recent ones, all tend to be about the size of a couple of stacked toolboxes, or of a suitcase, housing disks, video cards, removable media drives, and, in some cases, a really cool glowy side window with CPU. They're big. It's weird to put them elsewhere, or more accurately, if given the choice, we don't want them elsewhere.

Some people don't have the luxury of a corner or dedicated room, of course, and then we see things like the dining room computer. Photos of these are harder to find, but here's one and here's another one. For my own bit, this was the setup we had at my Dad's house, for reasons I can't recall. I would work in the dining room, in a house that was now too big to do much in once the divorce happened. Originally, the house had this massive playroom downstairs in the basement that looked out over the lawn, but a combination of it being cold and the room being utterly cut off from the rest of the house (which I found terrifying as a child) meant it ended up becoming nothing short of a broken toy crypt, and certainly no place for the computer. So the dining room it was, and so one side of the dining room got filled with my computer crap. I still have memories of calling BBSes all night, until 5 in the morning, only to have my dad come out of his room, come into the area, and start screaming.

Looking back, his anger seems pretty misplaced: Oh my God, my teenage son has stayed up all night IN THE HOUSE and didn't DRINK, BRING OVER FRIENDS, or GET INTO STRANGE CARS. But either way, I was having a ball and the screaming didn't dissuade me from doing it all over again. After all, this was my power spot and I used it to collect the thousands of textfiles that became the heart of my later archive.

I assume for most people the dining room computer, or kitchen computer, was a by-product of needing to watch the kids, or not having an office room, or a billion other reasons. What it came down to, though, was once again a computer begat a pile of documents, machinery and connecting wiring into a heart, a center of the home.

For some people, this is how computers are. They're how they relate to the living space; they're places connected upon the world yet disconnected to themselves.

But I contend this seems to be changing.

I think this is the future of what we're starting to see:

What I'm pointing to specifically is a laptop computer, perhaps accompanying a mobile phone, resting on the coffee table of a living room, with a large TV that has connected to it one of the multi-use game consoles as well as a variety of other TV-manipulating devices, be they TiVOs, Apple TVs, homebrew items, satellite boxes, and the rest. As time goes on, I think this will be the default, with the usual spectrum in other homes, ranging from no computer in the living space (sans something like an iPhone) to the usual hell-boxes of computer insanity, say, what I'm currently writing in.

Before my own contemporaries begin howling, I realize that for some of us the inertial nature of our lives means the way we've set up computers since childhood will continue. I'm speaking of those who have a blank slate, who are now rising up to computer ownership and interaction. You know, people for whom touch screens are ubiquitous and a vital aspect of a photograph taken is to immediately demand to see it.

At the ROFLcon event I attended, they set up several ways for people to arrange for Friday night get-togethers. They set up a web forum, had an IRC channel, and even had some pieces of paper in one of the lobbies for folks to write what they wanted to do together. Everyone fucking ignored these. They used twitter. They jacked into the ROFLcon tag, sent massive twitters to each other, and arranged stuff their own way. I don't twitter that much and certainly not from any mobile device, so I ended up going home to change clothes and rest up before going to a concert held later in the evening. We could talk about how arrangements are done and how people communicated, but for that group, for that generally young group of people, it was Twitter. Period. That's how it was done.

Similarly, I think we're seeing the laptop becoming the computer. I think desktops are becoming specific purpose machines, used for video editing or graphics or games, but even there the laptops that can handle games are growing. I think people expect their computer world, their power spot, to be a mobile item, no longer a pipe organ but a traveling troubadour, ready at a moment's notice to strike up their favorite song wherever they may wish to be to hear it.

One of my friends wakes up in his bedroom and looks across at a beautiful desk he no longer uses, infused with papers and older equipment he hasn't touched in two years. His power spot is in the living room, sitting with his laptop and checking the world out in between games on his XBOX 360. In between commercials during his shows. For those slow moments in the DVD he's watching.

This theory of mine is just that, a theory. A series of anecdotes, of postulations. I don't pretend it's otherwise. But I think it's interesting to watch the nature of them, to see how the computer's relationship with us is changing and how our own lives are changing, separate from the hypesters and the marketers who will push any lifestyle that's more expensive, into the default way we communicate with the world.

I wonder if I'll be right.

Dramatic Pause

I met Jason at a top floor of the Caesar's Palace shopping center in Las Vegas. We'd hung out the rest of the weekend in Vegas, but we snuck in another nice meal at a restaurant he thought was great. It was great. We chatted and had some really great food and even some great dessert. Vegas is when we tend to see each other (different coasts) and we took this time out to spend more time before heading back to our coastal lives.

Driving west from Indianapolis with Jim, we stopped off at a restaurant that served some of the craziest meat dishes. We had rented a convertible and drove at relatively unhealthy speeds but discussed many awesome things. I don't get much time with Jim, so we made the most of it.

I mention all this because there was no drama, no problems, no issues. The plans were made, they were executed, and a great time was had.

These weblogs, these things we write into, be they livejournals or facebooks or myspaces or whatever, tend to filter for bad, for drama. Why write about the normal, good days. When something irks you, you want to get THAT down, take the time to make an entry because otherwise, who would read it.

Tonight I am healing. Tomorrow I go to the CPAP place (just a few blocks from my day job!) and get my new machine. My Wii Fit arrives in the mail. And I will have made even more progress editing my film. I was asked to shoot a music video and we're working out those details. And I got my e-mail inbox down to a mere 14 letters. No drama, no sadness, no bitter shouts into the night. I am happy.

Hey, wake up.

Death Packet!

One of my favorite mail-based items arrived today in my post office box: a death packet!

"Death Packet" is my little nickname for one of my BBS Documentary packages that heads out to a foreign land (in this case, the United Kingdom) and then makes its way through a variety of customs agents and mail systems, until finally getting the Big Bounce from someone at the end or nearly the end, at which point it sadly tromps its way back to me. Eventually, it ends up in my little PO Box, sadly awaiting pickup from the fellow who sent it out.

In this case, the postmark from when I sent it out is October 27th, 2007. It got to its destination somewhere in the November 10th period, at which point it got put into a "Nobody Wants This" bin, then sat there until February, and then slowly came back at what I assume was horseback, arriving here in May, 2008. So that's a seven month journey for the little guy.

Not surprisingly, the package came back with the little nuggets inside totally safe and untouched. Normally, if someone's going to break open the package and watch the films (this does happen), then it gets to its destination. I think opening stuff then sending back the dead husk must set off specific alarms, because I've not experienced that yet. But what amazing marks this one has all over!

Traditionally, the receiver has already contacted me and I've sent out a "replacement" by this time. In this case, it may be that someone orders something then leaves the company, or they have it going to a place that doesn't know they'll be picking up their private mail. I've had what appears to be family intercepts, or maybe ex-family intercepts. It ranges, and that part of the story is harder to discern.

All I know is that I'm glad it doesn't smell like fish.

The Penalty Box

I've been sick on and off for about a week.

I don't get sick often but when I do I take forever to get well again. It is never enjoyable to get sick, of course, but I have this additional feeling of missing out. Missing out from projects to work on, missing out on events happening, and generally not being there for people who I want to see. In other words, a complete angst-ridden convalescence.

The downside to being a productive person is that leisure or forced inaction is rattling, like being bound or imprisoned. I've spent hours sweating it out in bed, knowing I can't be doing too much or it'll just lead to a backslide. I'm way too good at backsliding.

I did get some stuff done here and there; for example PHRACK Issue #65 was apparently released this past April and someone was kind enough to stop by to let me know, so that's up now. I purchased and had shipped the next machine that will house textfiles.com. I went to my cousin's graduation (he now has a master's in library sciences with a specific in digital archiving - warms my heart). But usually it was a case of face down into a pillow.

Content follows.

Deep in Editing

With editing GET LAMP something like 4-5 hours a day, every day, my time for updating this weblog is getting scant, and random. I might add a helpful and thoughtful entry every day, and then nothing, nada for a while. I suggest you utilize the RSS feed if you aren't already.

I have no real complaints about this task, but it is time-consuming. Last time it took 8 solid months for BBS, but this one is half the hours, so hopefully it'll be notably quicker than that. Watching an interview about some new video game bingblah, the interviewee quoted Shigeru Miyamoto and said that nobody remembers how late something was before it is finally finished, but everyone remembers a horrible work. So I'll go with that approach.

I also did a calculation and I believe my weblog now has more writing by me than anything cohesive (non e-mail), elsewhere, combined. That's a lot of writing. I suggest checking up some of the classics.

The Fun Drive? Oh, Wait

I've been debating whether to celebrate 10 years of textfiles.com by having a fund drive.

I figure I'd change the opening page (which would only show up on the main site, not the mirrors), with a quick "hey, throw me some bucks if you've had a good time" message, and have my paypal there (and maybe an address to send cash). I go back and forth on this, but it might be helpful. I just spent $600 to upgrade the machine textfiles.com runs on and of course the bills are notable (but not crushingly so).

My prediction is this would yield me seventy-nine dollars.

I figure I'd run it for the month of June, then focus on the more positive festivities for October.

Hard to say, really. It's one of those ideas you have to really sit around and mull, considering the positive and negative aspects. When my local public radio station goes all street-corner whore on me, it always feels icky, like one of your teachers is asking for a fiver at the end of class.

I'd be all up for interviews and discussions with people about the site and what it means, although I'll bet a half-awake person browsing this weblog would have learned it all already. But who knows, it might be fun.

This is one of those embryonic ideas I'm not sure what to do about. We'll see.

Blockparty: The Competitions and Awards

Because he is incredible, and he truly IS incredible, Jim Leonard has taken the hours of raw footage of the competitions and awards of Blockparty and rendered them out into a coherent collection of events and browse-worthy movies.

Here's the central page for all of this. You can even watch songs being played, while the ambient sound of the audience reactions wash over them. The main point of watching the demo and music movies is audience reaction, after all, and you can hear the oos and ahs and the fun as people make up soundtracks, shout out, or otherwise make their opinions known, right now, at the screen.

I suggest seeing the "wild" competitions, lots of fun in their own right, with the audience particularly reacting the one often one-off performances of technology and skill.

What an awesome show that was!

The Mask of the Night

Here is what the new face of my sleeping hours will be.

My second sleep lab was a fitting; they had me take an Ambien, and had me wear a nose mask, then they tried different pressures on me throughout the evening. (This time, thanks to Mr. Ambien, I slept the full night.) Did you know that one of the side effects of Ambien is compulsive gambling? Wanna bet?

I detected no night-and-day with the night spent with the mask because it's a weird place to sleep in a hospital and with all the wires connected. But I definitely had something being done to me overnight, so we'll see what happens. As it stands, I have the mask but I don't have the machine (CPAP) that connects to it; all this has to be observed and approved by my doctor. I expect the machine to arrive soon, and then we'll see.

It would be interesting to see how much more happy and productive (and possibly weight-losing) I'll be with this new tool. Combined with my new drug regimen for my gout/kidney stones and blood pressure, I may be the healthiest in years.

If it doesn't work, of course, I intend to use it to scare children.

The Wikipedia Database Secret

Actually, it's probably not entirely a secret, but here you go.

Wikipedia database dumps fail constantly.

They fail in great numbers, and are then not re-attempted for weeks. As a result, many changes go on for months with no backup. The databases sometimes scroll off, meaning you lose the older ones while not having new ones. It is a big goddamn mess.

Maybe you didn't know about these database dumps. I've been downloading them pretty seriously for a few years now. Even the insane twiddling of a thousand little emperors can't divest things like the great talk pages, the surviving-for-a-while articles later deleted, and the link lists. It's worth it to have these things. It's something else to keep around.

The administrators like to say they're working on it, but the fact is, they're not able to keep up. They're breaking. Millions coming in and they can't make this work. It's very sad.

I save a lot of things. It never hurts and disk space is cheap. I've been downloading every wikipedia image uploaded. I've been downloading every flash sent to 4chan. I've been grabbing many webpages and offered items, and many times in the past few years this has been rewarded, as things are lost forever... until I put them up again.

Here's hoping someone there gets their act together. I'm waiting....

A Payphone Map, 25 years on

I was recently sent mail about a payphone textfile that has found new life on Google Maps.

Here it is, along with some background history from the author, which I'll reprint below:

"A collection of payphones in Santa Barbara that I compiled in 1982 when I was 14 years old. I still have the address book so I called all of them to verify which were still in use. I knew if I got a voice mail or a business or even more obviously a disconnect message then the payphone was no longer there. Out of an original list of 300 there are only 73 left which comes out to 24% which is still higher than I expected. I uploaded it as a textfile to my best friend's BBS (the predecessor to the internet) in 1986 and he said it was his number one most downloaded file. So apparently there were other teenagers out there with a fascination with crank calling payphones. It's somewhat normal for teenage boys to crank call but I didn't want to disturb people in their homes so I was a considerate crank caller."

I'm also including the map itself, although this might not work for everyone.

Some people might not be aware of this, but it's the sunset of the payphone. AT&T is pulling them out of places by the truckload, giving up that maintenance and accounting nightmare in lieu of the cellphone and the internet connection. Phone phreaks are sad, and of course I have my own memories, but keeping vending machines around for sentimental reasons would be silly.

I'm assuming the list he refers to is this one, which is in a nice directory of similar compilations. These were handcrafted things, made by driving or walking around and noting what was where and what the numbers were and generally being a bird watcher type, selecting the world's interesting points for later recounting.

In case anyone missed it, many payphones stopped accepting incoming calls years and years ago, because they were being used by drug dealers as points of contact and business. That action turned them from places of communication and community to the aforementioned vending machines, in my opinion; you could pay and call out but never get someone calling back, or able to find you there, or anything else. With that, the phone numbers themselves became less important, because nobody could call them.

We'd have killed for something as cool as the Google Maps interface to payphone lists like we have above. It puts it all in perspective, with locations shown, descriptions of the places, and easy directions. This was, in a rare exception, when you could have excursions related to telephone hackery, finding all the places payphones could be shoved and keeping track of what the numbers were.

The miraculous is becoming mundane, perhaps.

That Endless Knocking

At some point last year or so, I discovered my box was sending out spam. Lots of spam. Thousands of pieces. I felt very bad. It took me a while to figure out where and how. Basically, I had a somewhat old methodology for allowing people to submit to the BBS List and so you could jam in any old MAILTO variable and your body data and start pinging other people with it. And a few organizations were doing this. And by organizations, of course, I mean rat fuckers.

So I fixed the thing, but kept it sending me copies of attempts. Somehow, I got a kick out of watching a script try and force this now-repaired web page to send out spam. I got to see what was big in the spam world at that point, and what kind of targets were being attacked, and so on.

It got old. It still works, but I kind of ignore them.

Similarly, some set of people like to post spam comments on this weblog. To do this, they have to type in a password. They appear to target a couple entries that must have the most link-backs or something, because it's only those two that get the love. The others get by just fine without this personalized (a person is doing it) spamming. Again, I must make clear: rat fuckers.

There's no solution. There's just none at all. I think this will be like this forever, generation after generation of rat fucker trying to use weblogs as spam. Twitter as spam. And they all think they're doing something good and they're all perfectly above board and in fact they're rat fuckers.

I've encountered, through third parties, the kinds of justifications that try to say that what they do isn't THAT bad. You are shocked, I bet! People think that unsolicited advertising blasted at maximum radius is somehow a kind or humanitarian effort. I've also met people who think smoking is good for you. I meet a lot of people.

But until this type of person is wiped off the face of the earth, and I don't believe they ever will be, I get to watch it day after day. Knock knock knock.

It gets very, very old.

Huzzah and Thanks

Three boxes arrived from ULINE to my house.

The three boxes contained five hundred more boxes.

Why did I order three boxes containing five hundred boxes?

Because so many people have ordered my documentary that I ran out of boxes to ship them in.

Roughly three thousand of you have ordered copies of my little movie.

Thank you.