ASCII by Jason Scott

The Art of Noise

This entry is somewhat self-indulgent and much more of a multi-media youtube link fest than I normally would find myself doing, but the opportunity to talk about something important to me and my personal influences is just a tad too great, and after all, in today's copyright-violating internet goulash, it's just so simple to dip a ladle into it to demonstrate what I'm talking about.

Everyone has their own musical journey, the experience of what bands influence them or which ones make them realign their relationship to the world. For some it's social, for some it's the music itself, and for some it's the personalities of the band or the personalities of the fans who like the band. Maybe it's even the places you first heard the bands. There's a lot of different paths, but the template is generally the same: person + music = changed person.

At 11 and 12 I didn't get along with a whole lot of people and moving to Brewster, New York, I got along with even less people than before. I didn't like how life was going, and while I was smart enough to know that suicide would provide me with even less possibilities, I didn't see much chance for escape or a greater happiness. One exception, of course, were computers; along with the amazing machines themselves came a beguiling and interesting world portrayed in computer magazines, advertisements and game covers that promised me that once I got out of this fucking dump, there'd be really cool people I would want to be with, somewhere. Probably California. Still, growing old and ending up somewhere isn't really escape in the sense that a pre-teen really expects, so I instead was rather erratic in my behavior and outlook on the world.

Musically, I was somewhat limited, but I did see MTV on the first day it came out and I listened a little to various pop music that was out there, as well as the standard bands like Twisted Sister or Duran Duran that saturated the landscape. I didn't buy much in the way of albums because my money didn't flow that way (I had little of my own) but I knew there wasn't a whole lot I wanted to run down and scoop up, either.

That changed one day when I saw the following music video on MTV. I could waste three paragraphs describing the room I saw it in, the memory is so vivid. The junky zenith, the TV in the corner, the cramped second floor bedroom we all shared to save money. And this wonderful little thing:

Is it possible, 25 years later, to explain how wonderful this was for me? I can try. The sound, a combination of samples of things like cars starting, screeching, and a woman's voice, along with a musicality beyond mere noise, was unlike anything I'd heard up to that point. Oh, I'm sure in music libraries there were gabillions of precursors, but I didn't have the opportunity to hear them. And the direction of the video itself was strange even by MTV standards. A strange girl-woman, semi-threatening men with tools destroying musical instruments, clipped editing of actions, all on some sort of destroyed industrial landscape. You can bet I ran to the TV and carefully memorized the name of the band and album in the corner when the video ended.

The name, of course, was The Art of Noise and the song was called Close to the Edit, although at the time I was not entirely sure which was which. The director was named Zbigniew Rybczynski and I quickly forgot that, instead trying to reconcile what I'd just seen. I knew I needed this song, this album, whatever it was part of.

Throughout my life I've seen breathtaking things, tracked them down and found them less than breathtaking. That's the risk you take and I was no stranger to disappointment even then. I just knew I had to find this album, though, at all costs. I started browsing record stores for it. Perhaps this is another chance to describe the difference between then and now; it was weeks, weeks and weeks, before I found this album. I was visiting my grandparents, and I went to every record store I could reach up there in that little town of Hudson, New York, and one of them had the album: "Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?". Imagine weeks of lag and latency between hearing a song and knowing how to get it or being given the option to get it. Those days are gone.

So I finally got this album, and bear in mind that I bought it and couldn't listen to it for some time, until we returned from our visit and I could get my hands on a record player, and then, and only then, could I sit down with a record player and my headphones and listen. I hoped, beyond hope, this would not be garbage.

Oh, it was so heavenly. From the first moments of "A Time For Fear (Who's Afraid)", I knew I was listening to a new way of doing such music, such sounds, that these surreal sonic landscapes were the cut-up excitement I was looking for in my world, to give me hope and inspiration, and so it did.

The band was composed of producers, composers and engineers for the Zang Tumb Tuum label, a UK-based production house and label that included a number of people who would go on to some very great things (and in fact had already gone off to some great things). The official "band members" of this Art of Noise were Horn, Morley, Langan, Dudley, and Jeczalik. More on them in a moment.

As part of the 2004 Prince's Trust concert, Horn and Dudley performed the song live. The description claims this is the first time it's been played live, and that's certainly not true, but it's the first time that Alan White (of yes), the original source of the drum sample, plays along. (He's one of the two drummers in the background and the video doesn't really concentrate him him much.)

Playing the bass is Trevor Horn, the producer of so much music, and one of the leaders of Art of Noise. If he looks like one of the guys with glasses in the original video, you'd be right: that's Jeczalik, Langan and Horn destroying the instruments. (The director has said in interviews he wanted to make concrete the way the Art of Noise was repurposing music with technology.)

If you do enough searching for "Art of Noise", you will now, instantaneously, be face to face with buckets of reviews, lore, interviews and delights about this band. I want to just focus on two other situations related to them.

Now in love with the band, I started trying to acquire every single record, album and single I could related to them. Realize what this entailed: any time I found myself in a city, I would go to every record store I could find, walk over to the "Pop" or "Pop/Rock" section, and look at the Art of Noise folder (rarely) or the A folder (not rarely). Inside would either be nothing related to Art of Noise, something related to Art of Noise, or a new Art of Noise thing I'd not seen before.

I did this for years. Years and years. I later added more bands to this roster and tour, but I was always looking for one more Art of Noise single, one more picture disc, one more rarity. And my hundreds of visits to record stores did yield significant reward.

There are some rare productions indeed buried in this pile. Some of them cost me all my spare cash at the time (No ATM machines for me to go to, no checks for me to be able to write with, no credit cards). Some of them are versions of songs that aren't anywhere else. Some are really weird cut picture discs (note that really odd "hand holding AON" custom-cut disc I'm holding). This was how it was done, if you were young and of little attachment to the record "scene" and just wanted one more amazing thing from your favorite band.

The second story is so weird and surreal I'm glad I have evidence of it, in this office, at this very moment, otherwise I don't think people would believe me.

Art of Noise went through a lot of upheaval and changes and directions over the years, like any band would. But in 1999, they released a new album, called "The Seduction of Claude Debussy". It was, in many ways, a sort of strange return to the older days, but also a reflection of the work of Trevor Horn, who was a lush, involved producer who made all sorts of now famous records, including albums for Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pet Shop Boys, Yes, and Seal. I thought the album was pretty good, if not like the originals, and was just happy this wonderful band was still in business.

But then I heard of the tour.

Now, realize, how completely fucking random this tour was. It had, I swear to you, four stops. FOUR. Los Angeles, New York, Boston, London. I am still aghast at this. And it was so utterly random I happened to see this was going on. I learned about it a week before it happened. I learned they'd be in Boston. In a week. Out of nowhere. I could have been scheduled for a life-saving transplant that night and you'd bet I'd have been running through the streets, trailing wires and tubes, to get into the Paradise Rock Club to see the band.

So off I went to see this, this miracle, this performance of Art of Noise in a tiny, tiny rock club, in my own town. The price was cheap. There was no way not to have a perfect view. I was there hours early.

Sitting with a friend who coincidentally had shown for this event, I was showing him a couple rare Art of Noise discs I'd brought along, maybe to get signed, maybe just to show how much of a real fan I was. A couple people noticed my collection, including one older gentleman, who looked at the picture disc and said "Ah, that brings back memories."

I said, and I still remember this, "Yeah, that was during the Paul Morley Artistic Showoff Period."

"Artistic Showoff,", he smiled, and thanked me for bringing that neat stuff along, before heading away.

I looked at my friend. "Now, watch that be Paul Morley".

It was Paul Morley.

The band performed wonderfully, as I'd hoped they would. Anne Dudley was there, Trevor Horn, Paul Morley in front with a hammer and a strange outfit, and they did a great show. I was delighted.

When it was over, I got the attention of Morley and said "I'm really sorry."

He said it was no big deal. And invited me backstage.

So that's how I met a band that 20 years earlier had had such an influence on my childhood. I was hanging out back with Anne Dudley, Trevor Horn, and the rest. I introduced myself as their second biggest fan, behind one of my own heroes Ernie Longmire, who had done an even better job than I collecting obscure Art of Noise stuff. I found Trevor a ton of fun to talk to, while Anne seemed a bit tired but friendly. And yes, they ultimately signed the first album for me!

I also got to swipe a poster in the hallway announcing this album; a huge poster that I include some of my office in for scale:

I smile through a lot of bad times when I think of my incredible luck that night, how many circles of my life have been happily completed and closed. I don't expect everyone reading this to particularly like the Art of Noise; I'm sure you could replace their name with many others for a band that touched you like this, that drove you in a certain direction; I know the use of cut-up and sampling of Art of Noise prepared me, mentally, for bands like Yello and Negativland that came afterward in my life. But I hope that maybe, in my own way, I've given a taste of how important something as simple as a few songs can be, to someone who wants to have something to dream about.

Hacker Photos, 1990-1993

While adding a bunch of CD-ROM images to the cd.textfiles.com site, I found one of them, "Forbidden Subjects 3", contained a nice selection of "Hacker GIFs", otherwise known as "Photos". These all date to the 1990-1993 period and appear to be primarily from ATDT, a hacker BBS in Massachusetts that was one of the inspirations for what would eventually become "The L0pht".

Here is the Flickr set. I haven't particularly made an effort to remove duplicates from other sets I have, because I think this collection is best served whole.

People have a lot more hair, seem a lot thinner, and seem enormously harmless. It's looking through these, I think, we see how silly the "Cyberwarrior" threat matrix starts to seem.

See if you can find Joe Grand, of Grand Idea Studio.

There's a lot of great memories here.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The Boutique Website

What a marketer, sales weasel, or heavily persuasive speaker seeks to do when they seemingly coin a word or phrase out of the air is own it.

Ideally, this word or phrase might be a term already in use (but not quite universal), so they can manipulate the conversation into a direction where they dictate the inherent meaning and usefulness of the word to their own ends.

When Apple computer took the word podcast from the cat-fighting Dave Winer and Adam Curry and made it a default selection in itunes, they owned it. They dictated the conversation, while a large percentage of the audience might have had no particular knowledge of the term previously. More directly, I read a lot of marketer blogs (know thy enemy) and a frequent weblog entry template is "Here is Blipperblapping. What is blipperblapping? Let me tell you. Coincidentally, my company sells Blipperbapping enabler software and documentation/tools."

I am about to do this to you. But before I do that, I want to talk about marketing and hyper-reality a little more.

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There is a reason I have not set foot in an Einstein Bagels for ten years and will continue not to. It is my own reason and I don't expect others to take up their arms and join me.

A job or two ago, as was often the case, I got hungry, and as was even more the case, close location of a store won out over a better quality store. So this was how I found myself in an Einstein Brothers bagel shop, which offers bagels and other composed meals in a truly generic manner from a time-tested fast-food concept which falls further along the Subway and Pizza Hut and Boston Market realm.

Walking in, I glanced about the store. Plastic sign heralded plastic prices of types of food with photos of some food near the prices and underneath similarly-dressed employees scurried back and forth behind glass partition housing examples of some food. Curved benches and plastic-topped tables with pressed particle-board insides yielded to corridors of rough-hew-appearing floor tiles punctuated with scattershot "people fences" indicating lines. Dropped ceiling material reigned above and the occasional false plant punctuated the scene. On the wall was a mural.

The mural contained a storefront, splashed with a patina and age-earned fuzziness, on which was written "EINSTEIN BROS.". Nearby was a horse-drawn cart.

I walked out and never came back.

When you walk into a McDonald's restaurant that has adorned itself in 1950s wear, harkening back to the company's roots as the efforts of two brothers who sold the idea to a businessman who innovated for decades and helped bring the organization to its current dominating success, that architectural story is true. There were really McDonald's restaurants in that era, and while they obviously did not have the same spectrum of items, you are, like it or not, a bit player in a half-century drama centered around a burger and fries. It may be an ugly truth to some, but it is a truth.

No such situation exists with Einstein Brothers, founded in 1990 by a linebacker and his brother in law and other investors, built to a relative success and sold to the Boston Market chain in 1995 (itself purchased by McDonald's sometime later), it is a hatched newling compared to something like McDonald's or, say, the Kellogg brand. It is not a product of, as is implied by the mural, upwards of 7 decades of bagel-related process and consideration. It is a lie. It is telling you a lie to sell you bagels.

The lie washes over some people, but so does a lot of things. Our relative sensitivity to various issues is an aspect of being human. I've come to witness images and films which, in other contexts, might cause a person's heart to stop beating regularly. Things that make me react, meanwhile, will surely cause some people who would barely blink at a revealed tit to sniff and sneer at my erudite efficaciousness. So be it, giggling mouth-breathers. But it's what drives me, as a historian, truly mad.

To that level, there is a lot of attempt to claim, through any means necessary, an authority or desirable aspect which would actually take a large amount of effort but which, it turns out, is not actually necessary. For example, and we'll stick with the food industry here, because everybody eats out and everybody especially finds themselves in these chain restaurants because fuck, it's late...

Chains like Applebee's, Pizzeria Uno's, and TGI Friday's all contain one interesting shared aspect besides fried food and alcohol. They all have familiarity shelves.

These are shelves of stuff. We are not told whose stuff this is, there's no sense where stuff comes from. If you walk into a newly-opened restaurant, the stuff will already be there. Contrast this with, for example, Hard Rock Cafes, where the "stuff" is all semi-famous musician cast-offs. Naturally they'd be there with the opening because they would be acquired through brokers or middlemen and readied for decoration in the Hard Rock Cafe. The "story" is "here's a bunch of crap from musicians, you like musicians and you like to rock so eat some goddamn food and drink some high-profit alcohol here at the rocking Hard Rock". This is a story that I can understand. Not so with the other chains.

The stuff on those shelves is old, new, maybe referencing local events, teams or the like. They are placed there by a professional, hung by professionals, meant to be interesting but not offensive and interesting but not distracting. They are eyeball chowder, cutting up the bland walls with varied color and text that gives a feeling of non-menacing background candy. You are in a place with a history or at least a personality, it says. Never mind whose and never mind what. It's nice to have you here, we have free refills.

These are hyper-reality. They imply, through decoration, something they are not. In the case of the Hard Rock and McDonalds, even though I indicated these were "honest" representations of things that happened or are in some way real, they're still not really real. They are saying things that aren't entirely true, but which are certainly more true than "this chain founded in 1990 is from 1915" or "The owner and staff of this establishment has put their heart into this place and have decorated it with memories, places and events that mean something to all of us here who come to eat and drink and maybe just maybe get laid." A sandwiched layer of mis-truth, but some mis-truths worse than others.

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Since I'm way the hell down here anyway, let me just mention the most honest fast food chain store I ever visited.

I am calling this up spontaneously so I don't have the name of the town this was in, but I can describe the circumstances. I am almost positive this was in California, during one of my crazy trips I took for the BBS Documentary where I drove from San Diego to Seattle and found myself in a lot of weird backroads and places. It might have been Oregon, but I don't think so.

I found myself in need of gas and got into a pretty strange little off-ramp that took me to a town that was about 10 miles off the interstate, and of course once you're five miles in with no gas you're committed, buddy, so I was in this little town getting a fill-up. By some trees was a little Dairy Queen. It was made of wood and looked like an overgrown shed. This was a time when I would scarf down a Dairy Queen brownie sundae with no guilt or pause, so I made my way in before heading to points yonder.

The bulletin board inside this little dairy queen had a lot of notices of local events; more than just a couple things for sale and come to the carnival, this was all about high school events, and stuff for sale and charity dinners and an unusual amount of local news. But what really got my attention was the book.

On the counter while I was waiting was a book. Inside were the lives of the employees.

Photos of graduations. Photos of people working, smiling, hanging with friends. A renovation/rebuilding of this Dairy Queen had happened at some point, and there were photos of people pitching in and fixing stuff up. I remember photos of some people winning prizes and photos of the owner smiling with some of the kids. I recall, in fact, mentions of second generation employees, kids whose parents had worked in the Dairy Queen who were starting off. It was a beating heart of community, right there on the counter next to the napkins.

The whole place was hand-done. This wasn't some plastic bookend that looked like it was rolled out of the back of an infernal machine. It was hand-built and hand-designed, with the low ceiling and screen windows in the rear of the place that gave it all a feeling of a summer camping ground's lodge. It was, in its own way, beautiful.

I ate that sundae a little more thoughtfully than I normally might have.

Walk into any chain store where the employees are behind a barrier or window and provide you food in front of a plastic menu. Walk in and twirl around and look at the environment, and tell me if you get the feeling of a place where the employees do not see it as a prison term, a series of days multiplied by 9 and a number with a decimal in it, to result in a slip of paper meaning some level of enjoyment or freedom elsewhere. Tell me they'll send their children there with delight, into that dull pit, and want to capture the moment on film, as this little Dairy Queen in the hills did.

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What I am getting at, here, is that beyond the implication of warmth and humanity via decoration, is the enforcement of the appearance of quality and knowledge. It is so hard to fake competency, very hard. That sense you get, speaking to anyone, and within a few short moments your mind tells you I am conversing with a meat puppet. Someone is getting his decimals an hour and for him the clock ever looms, an indicator of freedom or slavery. He may think it doesn't come across in his eyes and gait but it sure as fuck does.

The genius, the twisted brilliance of a lot of chains and stores is that they account for this, the assumption that the meat puppet will ultimately fail them and not be a winning portion of the selling process. They design the stores so that you're kind of trapped there (witness many consumer electronics stores or Toys R' Us and those "consumer corrals" that you have to enter and leave through). Once you're trapped, you go for the easy thing instead of making the effort to just walk the hell out and go somewhere real. Selection is a watchword; if you can't be served competently you at least can be served with many slightly incompetent but accessible options.

All of this is engineering to take the humanity out of the action, because the humanity, in the aggregate, will fail you in volume. There simply aren't enough people to guarantee quality of a certain degree to this level of volume (hundreds of stores), and so you ensure they don't rape or assault anyone, punish the people performing below a certain level, and occasionally reward the cream of the crop before throwing them into management where they can't infect the others. If this sounds cynical, it's time-tested information.

But this is also the level and usefulness of blog-whining, so let me kick it up a meta-level here to get to what I'm really talking about.

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There are two main divisions in product selling: volume and premium. This is simplifying economics to the level of "Astronomy is the study of the moon" but stick with me.

In volume, there are a whole set of things you do as a marketer and designer and businessperson to get the most amount of people in the door or buying your stuff as possible. You put your stores in easily accessible places or make a website with an easy to remember domain name. You make those suckers big, big as you reasonably can. You don't waste time on quality beyond a certain level of competency because there's diminishing returns for relatively less reward: sell crap at $20 and ten thousand pieces instead of very good crap at $200 and thirty pieces. You stress your awesome low prices and your awesome bright store and your awesome savings and make sure nobody gets trampled. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

In premium, you get the best stuff you possibly can, get the best staff to accompany the stuff, offer the best, know why you think it's the best, and present it in an environment of true and real quality, far divested from the crapola of the modern or previous ages. You build an island of pride, of tradition, and drum into your staff and supplies that the best will not be good enough.

The motto of the Waldorf Astoria kitchen is "The Difficult Immediately, the Impossible a Few Minutes Longer".

Here's the thing, though. Both of these approaches can be faked.

You can have a place that exudes quality and richness but do so in the same way an insect has camouflage to resemble a leaf or a stick. You can spray gold paint on anything. You can make a place quiet and seem like it's been there a hundred years, but any amount of time in there and it'll still suck. Las Vegas, which I spend a lot of time in each year, has many examples of this, in both directions. I've seen some real amazing high-end efforts utilizing learned decades-old or hundreds-of-years-old knowledge, and I've been in places where the "quality" goes down about a centimeter, like a marble veneer on an empty plywood box.

Interestingly, there can be fake volume, too! One of the attributes of many a crappy big "market" I've been in is a lack of true selection, craptastic staff moving slowly, prices that aren't really low or even competitive. You get the big box and the implication of the best deal and all you're getting is a bloated dimestore with a barely functioning distribution system behind it.

When something achieves success in this world through quality, also-rans run to snatch some of the pie, and the entire idea is devalued. This is kind of how it works and will always work. A new product comes out, made really well using good materials, and then clones appear within months and use crappy material and ape the name and look without any of the thought behind it and pretty soon nobody thinks of the product as having to be "good". A classic example of this is shoes. Woe be to the shoe historians out there; I feel for you.

But this is all discussing, generally real-world stores, the so called "brick and mortar" locations that themselves must be slightly less nimble than electronic counterparts because each motion represents delirious amounts of cost and time, preparing a location as one would a stage, trying to keep up with trends and fashions and falling prey, of course, to short-cuts. You know this in your heart; I'm sure you've witnessed it.

But websites have scant excuse for all this chicanery.

Programming and design can be quite difficult; believe me, I would be the last in the world to degrade these arts. I would supplicate myself at the feet of anyone capable of a competent and robust and scalable application. I know the pain, the many pitfalls, the punishment that is meted out when an unintended misstep results in exposure of private details or unintended glimpses into the machinery out back. I indicate nothing otherwise.

But there is so much in the way of templates, of snap-in semi-competent code, of competent code that itself must be configured competently and is not. Where before at least a real-world set of licenses, inspection and oversight might make your presentation subject to at least a base quality or reference, no such situation exists for your website.

Many websites invent new user interfaces and then implement them poorly. Many lack actual content that wouldn't fit on a single-page pamphlet. Scads make no effort to understand why people might arrive. Thousands, it seems to me, feel no poorer for handing over swaths of space on their website to whatever "ad network" may hand them a few measly dollars.

Sites will pretend they know what they're doing, or lie outright. They'll register subdomains and feel that's all they want in the world. Others will pretend they're the "best site" for some piece of information, some easily-copyable conflagration of text or graphics and be surprised how easily anyone else could duplicate or emulate their precious little consumable.

I introduce the term "boutique website". A site that is honest, filled with prime content, easy to navigate, responsive to communication, run by a person or persons beholden to only doing what they do as best they can with the time they have. It is a term I will use freely in the future.

It is also, I am sad to say, apparently a phase. A site will be truly boutique for a short time before rotting, like a particularly juicy fruit left on a plate in the sun, a moment we can hopefully capture and delight in before the candor dissipates and we're left with only a memory of what once was.

We will enjoy our boutique websites, our moments of quality in the sun, and dine freely of them, and when the day turns gray and the rain comes, we will, I hope, not bemoan of what has been ruined but delight that for a moment, like a breath, the ruination did not yet come.

Cascade

A bunch of stuff got moved ahead over the weekend.

The office from which I do most of my stuff, received an (announced) visit by none other than Koz of rsync, an old buddy. He'd not seen the new office, so I wanted to make a good impression and used this as an excuse to clean the sucker utterly. Doing this revealed a bunch of CDs and a long-promised project to copy cd.textfiles.com for my buddy Gene, so...

..I then started copying a bunch of CDs over to cd.textfiles.com, which resulted in the site having 451,000 new files online. They're pretty much all amiga and many appear to be somewhat redundant, but there we go, 12gb of new files. This made me regard my storage array differently, which meant...

...I shifted my collections of data around and found 70gb of redundant data. This was stuff where I found a nice mashup album or a documentary in mp4 form or what have you, and I guess I had it in 3-4 places at once. Now I only have it mirrored and archived. So that was a lot of space. This got me thinking about space...

..so I modified how the textfiles.com machine stores data and have room for hundreds more gigabytes of data. This means I could finally....

...go through a stack of CD-ROMs I wanted to add to the site but didn't know if there'd be space for it. It also meant....

....I was able to set aside additional room for footage for my film.

This is how it works.

Wherein June 19th Gives You Tidings

Greetings and hello. As you've no doubt recognized, with these summer months have come a slowdown of weblog entries. While I had time, scant time, to write some helpful and/or entertaining entries on a daily or near-daily basis, I really am just too busy to do that right now, and I absolutely refuse to fall in with the "list of links with pithy one-liners" crowd, choosing instead to just focus on the weblog's style of essays and considerations. A few short items have come to my attention, so I'll combine them all today.

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Benjamin's Hot Button

A very large "Buzz" was generated recently by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is a movie retelling of an F. Scott Fitzgerald tale. The story is simple; a man is born at 70 years old and slowly grows younger as time passes, experiencing life in reverse. From this, all sorts of insights into the human condition are yielded. I am delighted to experience from this that there are people after my own heart, who are inspired to do things above and beyond with the original material. The trailer for the movie is in high definition and sadly way too revealing of things that will be of relative interest to someone expecting dramatic reveal. But that aside, there's a more meta-interesting issue with this whole situation:

The movie is to be released at Christmas.

It's the middle of June. This means that the movie is being promoted a full six months before release. Six months is a very long time; Yahoo may not still be an independent company by then; a lot of celebrities will have died; we may be in financial problems as a nation; we will know who the next president is. This is, in other words, a rather long time. If the item in question were a game or product of that ilk, then one could see months of ramped-up anticipation. But it seems like, more and more, it borders on ludicrous to announce and provide material for a 2 hour production a full half-year before anyone can purchase it, and months beyond that (though not many) to acquire a home version.

I am aware of, and probably coherent of, more than many of how Hollywood works and especially how marketing works within the Hollywood machine, and especially how a lot of what you encounter via Hollywood is elaborate in both execution and planning. Nothing is left to chance, truly and honestly. Not a jot or a tittle. So some set of folks, who do some amount of decisions for people who have an awful lot of money and wish to make it grow, believe that six months of anticipation or announcement is necessary for the film. These are not dumb people and they are certainly not inflexible in game plan; if you've ever walked into a video store and seen a movie you've never heard of starring people you have, and it's just come out, that was on purpose. Similarly, it is probable that you know there was a new Indiana Jones movie that came out this year and very unlikely you didn't know. So why think that six months of warning is needed?

One possibility might be the salary of Brad Pitt, the star and currently, like it or not, on the top of the A list for recognition, "brand awareness" and bankability. His asking price is often quoted in the $20 million to $30 million dollar range, according to various sources. So perhaps this is to ensure there's a general "ah yes, that movie" feeling to its release on Christmas. I could see the warp occurring for that.

I have a memory of seeing a teaser trailer for "The Flintstones" that was a full year in advance. But that film had obviously not even begun production and they showed the star, John Goodman, in front of a generic background. I have no doubt this was done in that way to immediately see focus and general audience reaction to an idea, with budget and production then to be geared based on that reaction. But in this case, it appears the movie is quite finished and shot. It makes very little sense to me.

But another possibility, unlikely but worth considering, is a non-awareness that things really have changed in the contemporary media-consuming world. Some of these marketing situations are decades old, being proven time and time again: Get a girl on the poster no matter what, big name stars are more important than a good script, build buzz when a movie is hard to explain in a line or two, encourage censorship where you can so that more people will see it, and so on. There's an entire world of marketing that dates back to the 20s that's just wonderful, including the publicity stunts of yore involving manipulating the press and public to think something horrible had happened that coincided with the title of a picture coming out. It's very heartwarming, in a way. But those old chestnuts, while often a real firecracker, don't always pan out. It is very hard for me to imagine that a nice introspective film based off of an easily accessible story from 80 years ago requires such build-up. Maybe in the future these films will be sprung on us unawares, a mere week or two before opening. Maybe, and this is also possible, I have not the slightest idea of what I'm talking about.

---

Lit Wit

My man Flack asked me to repair a little-touched directory of my artscene.textfiles.com site, which contains what were called "Litpacks". I do not expect you to know what these are. What they were (they're not really made any more) were compilations of fiction and poetry made by the artscene, that set of kids who did artwork that were the feature of one of the episodes of my documentary. Whereas the "artpacks" of the time contained many different drawings, these pure prose "litpacks" would be available as well.

It turned out, upon my going in to repair this directory, that it was in a horrible state. An index.html file had been dropped in that was completely misleading, and the films were inaccessible. I quickly removed this index.html and found additional onion layers of repair to be done.

The result is a greatly improved directory, which has not just an introduction to the litpack scene but over 120 examples, all of them culled not just from what was already there, but from my suddenly scouring various contributed collections for additional missing sets of files. I had previously only offered parts 1, 3 and 7, for example, and now have shoved in parts 2, 4, 5, and 6 where possible. It is more complete, better arranged, and imminently more browsable.

I mention this because it's such a core of what I am. Once I was alerted that my own collection, my own collection was in a sub-par state, I could think of nothing else. Several hours of work resulted in the current state. I found out, for example, that I had multiple copies of the files but the sizes were different. It turned out that some of the versions of the files had passed through a number of bulletin board systems that had repackaged them with BBS ads. I made these slightly different filenames and described them as such. This minor situation was greater than I had previously understood, and was one of those situations where I had set aside some collections because of the lack of coherency to the collections. Now I have made some nice inroads, and the archive will grow as an example.

I do not pretend these files are overly important or earth-shattering. I certainly do not implore you to download them, unpack them, acquire the right viewer to see them properly (ACiDView is a good one) and mull over the writings, thinking you will great insights. That's not my job, really. I don't play judgment games with the files I am given. I just get them up for people to be able to reference, like Flack had intended to do with his friend and which he can do properly now. I have no doubt there are gems among this pile, but today is not the day that I found them or ask you to. It's just nice to know that, at the end of the effort, things ended up a little nicer and a little more complete than how I found them. That's the pleasure of archiving.

---

Strictly the Numbers

Like a surveyor assigned by his customer to demarcate the property lines, or perhaps some sort of explorer entrusted by his royal to understand the nature of the realm, I spent some time trying to get a grip on exactly how big textfiles.com is and what is where. Here is what I have sort of come back with.

Textfiles.com and webfiles.textfiles.com, the collections of BBS era (and BBS-era-like) textfiles that are the core of my archive, is 2 gigabytes in size.

Ancillary textfiles.com collections such as etext, digest and the like, are another 3 gigabytes.

Artscene.textfiles.com, which is all those crazy artscene-related files I just mentioned, weighs in at 77 gigabytes.

Audio.textfiles.com, the "sound of online", which has video as well as tons of sound stuff, is a portly 176 gigabytes.

Pdf.textfiles.com, containing PDFs, is just 25 gigabytes large.

Mirrors of sites I think are important that lurk about with the textfiles.com brand but aren't really "mine" in the sense of me curating them (like the bitsavers.org collection) adds another 30-40 gigabytes.

cd.textfiles.com, finally, is bloating up the world at over 300 gigabytes.

So the question that comes to mind, to the cascades of letters I get that boil down to "give this entire thing to me right now via whatever means necessary" is what do they mean when they say that? Do they mean textfiles.com's proper text collection, which is less than one half of one percent of all my data? Or do they mean they want it all, a process that will require a 1 terabyte drive and a few days of copying? Either way, it's nice to have some harder numbers as I go into tenth anniversary celebrations.

Midphase's New Goat Herders

This letter came in, in response to this weblog entry.

 Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:00:06 -0500
 From: Nick Nelson 
 To: mailbox@textfiles.com
 Subject: Maybe Midphase used to blow goats..
 
 Hi Jason.
 
 First, name's Nick Nelson, I'm part of the UK2 Group who recently 
 (within the last 7 months) purchased Midphase.com, as well as the rest of the family,
 and made various other acquistions throughout the hosting industry.
 
 It bothers me  - that your review, is listed so highly in google..
 while I have no doubt in 06, your review was likely justified. No doubt.
 
 It's 08 now..and I'd like to ask that you reconsider, or at least, give us another shot?
 
 Maybe even amend the review informing clients that Midphase was
 purchased, and that as far as you know, we could be the best hosting provider in the
 world.
 
 Yes - we purchased a brand, with a few bad reviews associated with it,
 and we have to live with that. But it definitely can't hurt to kick off an email
 maybe attempting to mend ties a bit.
 
 What do you say? Give midphase another chance..or at least inform 
 your visitors that the blog post is 2 years old and Midphase is now under completely
 new management?
 
 I'd be willing to extend a free year's hosting for you to give us
 another shot, anywhere in the UK2 Group family.
 

OH HEY HOW YA DOING

I am on Facebook, that umpteenth generation networking site that has benefited from the bones and corpses of all the sites before it. I have been using it for some time, and like all of these contemporary creations, I am taken with the complexity of them, as well as what is annoying.

Some very old lessons have been learned and so use of the site is enjoyable. I am pleased with the contextual link-pasting; the Facebook will browse the other end of a link and download whatever images are there, allowing you to "sign" the link with an appropriate icon for what is there. Similarly, links to sites like Youtube will bring up a little Youtube control panel icon so you can go right to the video. It even absorbs the text from the linked-to site for you to choose to put in your provided link. This is some very pleasant contextual pasting, and is a significant amount of years old in the User Interface field... but it's great to see it in use.

Also like a lot of such sites, Facebook tends to have a flat-field problem; sure, you can say how you know a person and even define the status of your relationship to that person, but you can't have circles of access to your own stuff. I have a lot of people who want me to be a myspace-like friend (and I want to be the myspace-like friend of others!), with "myspace-like friend" meaning "I have never actually met you and you certainly don't consider me a buddy, but you are really cool." There's no way to really do that beyond holding two facebook accounts, where one is for close friends who you want to tell you're taking a dump or going to be at some party downtown, and then the other one where you do air guitar poses and let everyone know they're absolutely awesome for making it down to the club tonight. And also to buy your new stuff which just came out! Which is also awesome!

I can't blame Facebook for this, because most sites seem to have done no real exploration/experimentation into this realm. You can sort of do it with livejournal, that is, have friends and then "people who can look at your crap", but that's not the same as "anyone can look at my crap / people who identify with my crap / people who see my secret crap". Since Facebook seems to be trying to evolve into next-generation thinking with their stuff, I hope something like this will happen. Unfortunately, we seem to be moving to the next generation of advertisements and choking the site down with absolutely worthless applications, but I can hope.

Anyway.

Recently, Facebook added an instant messaging application.

For a short, almost wintery-frost moment of time, this thing is a delicious buffet of communication delight, a tasty realm of muffin goodness. Let me tell you why.

Facebook's IM application is made using crazy script thingies and sits on the bottom of your Facebook page, lurking as a little grey bar of decoration. It seems quiet, a still pond or pile of forgotten cinderblock. Most people, and I do mean most, don't really pay any attention to it.

But what it enables you to do is this:

• See every one of your friends who are currently connected.
• Start conversations with them.
• Browse the Facebook site as if you were not talking on the bottom.
• Not lose the conversation as you do this.
• Start multiple conversations along the bottom.
• Get alerts that people want to speak to you.

It's the kind of hack that in some circles would get you ridiculed as you described the process by which you intended to do it. This is a bunch of scripting that is implementing its own random protocols, blowing out its own crazy crap in what I'll bet is plain text to central servers that are, to some extent, archiving the information to get around the fact that a webpage should really really not be a stateful client. This is an insanely bad idea, like when we all rushed headlong into using web pages for credit card purchases long before things were ready. The end justifies in the means, of course, so people don't mind as long as it's not them, currently, being screwed.

Since the thing is a security nightmare, it might as well be a complete and total nightmare, like the ones where you wake up and then find out you haven't actually woken up. So it constantly re-titles the webpage to indicate you got a message. It keeps a list of people who were sort of recently on, applying some crazy routine to determine idle activity on a page. In other words, it gives you a lot of information on people they probably don't know they're getting and it does it all the time.

I'm sure someone like Dan Kaminsky will wander along and utterly face-rape this thing into oblivion, but until then, I do want to say what the most important aspect of this new feature is to me, because I love it.

When people are your friends but not really your friends, you are sometimes cornered into being nice and gracious and generous when you really don't want to be. What saves you, often, is your generosity being in the realm of the inconvenient. "Come by anytime," you say. "We'll hang out," you promise. You are lying. You don't want this but it's a nice thing to say. Inconvenience, however, will save you. It's a pain in the ass to track you down. It's easy to ignore a mail and claim later that the Internet ate it. You have, in other words, a layer of protection.

This strips that away, utterly and totally. Now, anyone who sees you're browsing your webpage, people who you listed as your friends but they're not really your friends, can chat with you right now, right away. You stopped into Facebook to see if you got any mail or to check up on a person you're supposed to meet with, and now your grey bar is blinking and fucking goddamnit you're trapped. I absolutely adore that.

I am a communicator. Actually, I graduated from Communicator and past UberCommunicator to OverCommunicator Supreme. I sit on a throne of Way Too Much Talking and I will wield my scepter of Incessant Trivia and Yammering until nobody in my court can stand on their own feet. I know this. It's probably a big character flaw and maybe I even notice that myself, but sometimes, I just have so much to say or want to say hello or just want to hang out and shoot the shit until the sun burns out and then shoot the shit about the sun burning out.

OverCommunicator Supreme loves that there's this application that lets him immediately, instantly barge into the lives of other people, people working or browsing or busy with job or life, and go HEY HOW YA DOING. I will delight in hopping onto your couch and starting a conversation you have no time for and no will to endure and oh well, here I am and you friended me and that means something, motherfucker. I am intensely interested in you and now your little offer of Facebook linkage seems like it carries a slightly higher price than seeing my status updates. Salutations, buddy! Welcome to a new level of conversation hell. I am your host and the main act.

This can't sustain itself as it currently is. I'm sure it will give you easier ways to block people, or turn it off in the preferences. It may be that way now, but people are not inclined to just shut it off until they have a good reason.

I am that good reason.

WHY HELLO THERE.

Temporarily Deleted

Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:22:16 -0400
From: bobby bobby
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Certain textfile temporarily deleted.

Hello jason, i would first like to say textfiles is a very useful and interesting website.
I have used this specific article (http://www.textfiles.com/reports/ecology.rpt)
for a biology report, and to my unfortunate conclusion and past attempts, it is susceptible to
plagiarism findings by a search engine as simple as google. Being a secure and
conscientious teacher, she might search my report for plagiarism and fail me on my report.

I ask you with the greatest amount of respect and sympathy to please temporarily
take off that specific article for a total of 10 days so she does not find any plagiarism copying
in my report. Please email me back if this can be done, thank you.

From: Jason Scott
To: Plagiarist

No.

Talk Corrections, Weekend Connections

Two corrections to an entry I did a little while ago about talks I gave this year.

The first is that I forgot to mention Shmoocon, which I also attended and gave a talk at. An ironic thing, considering I recently added all the talks from the 2008 Shmoocon to my collection. The talk was on my footage recorded while at Mammoth Cave Park, and specifically the Bedquilt Cave. It was fun, although I look like living hell and am very tired. (I actually napped on couches in the hallway, because my energy was so low).

The second correction is that on a lark I submitted a proposal and it appears I am speaking at HOPE. My talk will be a whirlwind of hacker lore to make up for the fact that it's 2008 and many attendees were born after 1990. I'll be going over all the basics as fast as I can, to be a little primer for those that want some jumping off points. So there we go! I've spoken and am speaking in even more locations than I thought.

---

This past weekend was centered around my 20th High School Reunion. Yes, I really am that old. Held in a restaurant in New York City (the school itself was a couple dozen miles north of the city), a nice contingent showed up and a good time seemed to be had by all, especially the drunk ones. High School was a great time for me and I'm not afraid to see how people are doing. People are doing well, although maybe the losers self-selected themselves out of attending.

Two things to mention about my weekend in the city.

First of all, I was lucky enough to spend some time at the Telectroscope, a beautiful piece of work where a mythical tunnel between London and New York allows people to stand before a large telescope and see people on the other side of the Earth. Sure, you can argue about the ease of the technology, but the presentation was absolutely top notch. It was quite surreal to stand in front of this huge round glass, with the Brooklyn Bridge behind me, and be looking at a nice bunch of Londoners, stuck in the rain (they had umbrellas) and waving back. It was an excellent project and I'm happy to have been able to see it.

Second, I was also given the hint about The MOCCA Art Festival, which is a comic artist event where many dozens of talented and amazing comic book and art people show up and display their wares. I may have found the guy who will do some of the art for my packaging there. I even ran into a few people I'd interviewed in the last two interview cycles, which was neat as well.

All in all, a pretty great time. You know, at one time in my life I was instilled with a terror of New York City. I now consider those lost years to be some of the most tragic of my life. Here's hoping I can stem the tragedy more in the years to come.

Things My Users Have Taught Me

By users, of course, I mean the many fine millions who have browsed TEXTFILES.COM and its sites over the years.

• It can be really frustrating that the textfiles.com bandwidth seems so slow, so you better open 30-60 simultaneous connections via your Internet2-ready connection in Europe and get all the files at once before it slows down more.
• Textfiles.com is awesome. What it really needs, however, is javascript, ads, and everything else that makes a reasonable person abandon web-browsing as a soothing activity.
• If you're going to write an erotic fantasy story about two of your classmates fourteen years ago, be sure not to include their real names at the bottom along with what town and high school the fantasy is taking place, because there's nothing less awesome for you than a couple of 30 year old guys discovering said erotic fantasy is far and away the top google hit for their names.
• If you want to offer to be a mirror for textfiles.com, be sure to do so using a machine you don't own on a pipe you don't own using an account you don't pay for.
• If you want to utterly, totally piss off a ministry, file the transcribed pamphlets they made 15 years ago under "Occult".
• Textfiles.com has a file written in an afternoon by a 13 year old boy who uploaded it to one BBS in 1982 a month before the BBS went down forever, which the boy, now a 35 year old programmer, found online and sat there stunned.
• The same lesson about writing erotic fiction about your classmates goes the same for writing about a teaching assistant sleeping with your students, under your real name, and then going on to be a professor.
• If you can't remember the title, writer, full subject, any salient phrases, or context of a file, Jason Scott will still somehow find it for you, you just know it.
• Saying mean things is mean.
• It is now possible for a person to have been allowed on the computer and internet for the first time, found textifles.com, and get inspired by stuff you read and end up going to college in the subject that interested you.

Keep the lessons coming!

Yes.

The problem with filmmaking is that everyone has advice but a lot of advice is specific to that filmmaker. Sometimes people have general ideas that are probably of use to a set of folks, like how to do cheap-ass dolly shots or cheap-ass lightsaber effects. But other times, the big questions like "how do you edit" and "how do you sell it" are all kind of different for different goals.

My documentaries have not (up to this point) been things where I write out the answers and the "script" (a set of planned points) and then go out and film things. I go out and find a nice swath of people on points of a spectrum, and hit them up for questions, and then go carefully through the answers. I don't go into an interview saying "This is the 'Text Adventures were a New Kind of Literature' guy" and then force them through the grinder until they say what I need. Some people really do this. I won't and I don't even know if I can.

The downside of this is that I end up with a lot of footage, and right now, I go through things someone says with a fine tooth comb, and this is very time consuming. Time consuming enough that it's going to take a while. When I come out the other end with my final quotes and collections of clips, I then start to assemble the actual production. This happens relatively fast, but it's because of this massive backload of quotes and comments I've already collected. This is not dissimilar to how a restaurant gives you a nice meal in under 20 minutes, but it's because of hours and maybe days of preparation that happened before that. Your meal didn't take 20 minutes to make; it took many hours and the final bit was 20 minutes.

I don't know what's important or not. It might be a pause, it might be a gesture, it might be a statement. I collect statements together that are in a general sense the same ideas, but that's pretty arbitrary. I also massively overshoot; this is a 120 hour collection of footage for what will likely be 3 hours of final product, so there's a 1 to 40 filming ratio. (This is a lot for a sit-down documentary, but not a lot for a shot-on-the-run documentary). I just don't know yet what will end up at the end.

Yes.

A VERY IMPORTANT POINT: Jeremy Douglass, who is the fellow in the video clip above, is spending half the clip listening to me ask a question, and then is beginning to answer the question, when I cut him off. In other words, he's edited for comedy in the clip, and is in fact portrayed absolutely opposite to how he answers questions in the clips I've saved. Editing, my friends, is everything.

On the Onset of Another Video

I began some work on another music video this weekend.

Have no fear, nothing's being pushed aside; I just finished all my interviews from my London trip in December 2006 and am now going through the interviews from my very successful West Coast jaunt this past November. I'm currently pulling brilliance out of a pile of even more brilliance that is the Mary Ann Buckles interview. The work is progressing nicely on this, so don't get worried.

Some general experiences are now coming out when working on music videos, so I thought I'd share. I've discussed this subject before, of course.

Probably the most important questions to ask with a music video are:

• Should this even be made?
• Does the artist need to be in it?

Sometimes, you just have no need to make a video for a certain song. If you're lucky enough not to be contracted or under duress to shoot a music video, like I am, then you stop considering it. Not everyone has this option and sometimes I think our craziest music videos come out from people contracted to do music videos who really have no particular love for the song so they just go crazy on the little video itself.

Also, the artist's involvement may not be needed directly. Perhaps you are doing animation and the song is all that's needed. Or maybe you use other actors or people on the street and the band never appears. Since for some bands this is their big moment in the sun, they might want to be in it, or consider it a critical point. Other times, not so much.

I then start thinking about these questions:

• Do we need a story told during it, or is it just a bunch of shots?
• If the artist is in it, what are they best at? Posing? Dancing? Looking good? Nothing?
• Are there ways to make the video distinct, notable on its own grounds?
• Can you do that without dominating/supplicating the artist?
• Does the artist have a say? What are they comfortable with?
• What can you steal to make it all work?
• How much time do you have, for the whole project and the artist?
• What problems need to be solved now, because they'll take a long time?

If you're lucky, you tool around, do some test shooting, try different ideas, see what works. You talk with the artist, show what you got, and listen to the song for any other subtlety you might want to pull from the lyrics. In my case, there's a lot of trivia I need to bone up on, and a lot of art direction I need to consider.

It's a lot of fun. Consider having fun yourself sometime.