Dr. Hasegawa-San:

With much respect,
Jason Scott

Hi, Jason,

Akio Hasegawa, M.D., PhD
Pathologist
Odawara, Kanagawa, Japan

Without a doubt, the absolute worst way to find out about someone’s death is through referrer logs.

Among the people I interviewed for the documentary were a couple in Toronto, who for the purposes of identification were called “Milky and Liz”. We talked about diversi-dials (ddials), early BBS culture, BBS meets, and a whole other range of BBS-related subjects. All told, I interviewed this couple for about three hours, one of my longest interviews.

The interview was conducted in 2002, at the beginning of my interview sets, and since I didn’t know how many interviews I’d ultimately have, we covered everything we could. They were tolerant of my all-over-the-place style (I got better) and my talking too much about myself (I got better).

Ultimately, a good amount of the footage from their interview got in, comparatively: probably 2-3 minutes of clips across all the episodes. They were a happy, bouncy couple who had a lot to say and were wonderful to talk to.

I talked to them one more time after the interview, this year, to get a spelling of Milky’s favorite BBS for the subtitles, so it would be spelled right. They sounded different, but I assumed it was just me catching them on a bad day.

Today, from referrer logs, I found out Milky has died of cancer. He was around 30 years old.

Milky had another name, which I didn’t put on the documentary at his request. It was Ninjalicious, and he was the editor of Infiltration Magazine, a zine about urban exploration. He was a giant in this hobby, a figure many looked up to for advice and fun stories. His website is at infiltration.org.

Stories are pouring into the thread that started showing up in my referrer logs. It is heartbreaking.

I am now digitizing their three hour interview. It will go onto archive.org next, a memorial of sorts of a very fun and brilliant man who touched my life like he touched so many others.

Update: The interview is now up, in three pieces: hour 1, hour 2, and hour 3.

In the last months of his life, Milky worked hard to finish his book about the art of urban exploration. I don’t know what I would do if I was given the news of a terminal condition with regards to my current projects, but he finished his. The book is available for sale from his website and I would heartily suggest purchasing a copy; reviews have been very positive.

I am very sad today.

I have two big piles in my life: unfinished projects to do, and unfinished media to absorb. The piles are huge, because I acquire a lot of stuff and I get a lot of ideas.

One of the pieces in the unfinished project is a novel. I’ve had this novel on the back burner for roughly 9 years. All good unfinished novels have to get a good decade behind them before you either tell everyone cryptically that you’re taking two weeks off to work on something or throw the idea away, forever.

On the unfinished media pile was a book. A novel. In fact, idly reading its promotional paragraph before buying a copy about half a year ago, I kind of dreaded reading it. Because I knew it would have similar ideas as my own novel I’d been working on. However, that didn’t stop me from ordering a copy from Amazon, because I know more than most the regret that can come from seeing something interesting, not moving on it, and then finding it’s gone, lost forever.

The unfinished media pile is real and currently looms, literally over my head at my desk while I work on my projects. It is a massive pile of books and DVDs and pamphlets and other creation that needs my attention. I glance across the titles and read and either pull stuff down or leave it to get in my face again soon. It really is huge.

I had to do a particularly boring task for my employement that would take a few hours, so I finally bit the bullet and brought this possibly-like-my-nonexistent-novel novel to the work and read it while the task basically ran itself.

Two things came of reading it.

Number one, it was like my novel. Not exactly, of course, but very similar. Enough points are similar that you would go “Hey….” if you read them near each other. Not the vital “gotchas”, of course, nothing like that, but enough that you’d think the two of us were roommates at college or had cubicles facing each other at a temp job.

Number two, it is horrible.

There is no doubt there are passages with craft, with an effort put into them, obvious months of sweating the details. I was pleased with his take on certain points of videogame history, with how he tried to capture aspects of the videogame experience, and so on.

But there are parts here, throughout the book, where I’m just miserable at how ruinous the story is to videogame culture in general, and especially in its portrayal of the people who adore these parts of their youth. You can certainly point to the passages which show intense respect or at least admiration to the whole nature of videogames, but then this sniffing of flowers is followed by a steamroller of silly images, needless vulgarity, and horrifying juxtapositions or broken narrative. By the end, it is nearly unreadable.

It shows respect to the videogame culture he obviously spent some time studying and communicating with, much as a worm shows respect to an intestine.

I am not going to give the name of this novel, since I obviously am a biased person with his own little spiral-bound axe to grind, an author who didn’t make it to market before someone else made a similar whosis. It would be unfair and petty to show up in search engines as a review of it, with this semi-jealousy looming over me like a cloud.

The reason I bring this up is that I have two choices, really:

Give up on my project…. or kick his ass.

More than once I have gotten people who have mailed or communicated me about stuff I’ve been working on. “Man, I wish I’d moved ahead… I had some ideas, your site/project/work does it, oh well. Damn.”

In some cases, I understand; my monomaniacal approach to a lot of stuff gets things done in those arenas, and I’m proud at how massive they get.

But on the other side, I’m not perfect; the way I did stuff isn’t necessarily the best. You could take my data and then integrate it into your work and make the features better and add stuff I didn’t think of and link it all new ways so that using it is a complete joy.

You could kick my ass.

There’s something to be said for innovation, direct innovation where you say “I saw X, and now I am making Y, which will be X*2.” You acknowledge something came along before you were done, it got the “big ideas” out there in the world. Now the bar is back to you, and you better show how you would have done it even better… by doing it. Talk is, truly and utterly, cheap. Action is not.

So I’m out to kick his ass. Watch out.

And kick my ass too, while you’re at it.

Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:29:46 -0400
To: director@bbsdocumentary.com
Subject: Okay, I admit it!

I’ve just sent in my order, and I eagerly await the 80 minutes of
bonus footage that I missed!

I don’t know why it took me so long to finally announce this idea; I had it back in June but then life got a little busy.

Textfiles.com gets a lot of visitors. A LOT. Hundreds of thousands. And I get a lot of nice mail from a lot of people. Also, I like to go out on the town, rarely, but in an enjoyable way when I do. There’s nothing I like more than a big comfortable chair, some fine food, and talking to smart, funny people.

I live in Boston, Massachusetts, which is a dismal place for late night food. But there’s a restaurant that serves a full menu every night until 4am. They’re called the News Restaurant, and when I visited, I found out they had an absolutely spectacular private dining area that could seat dozens comfortably, and was both beautiful and the very comfort I was talking about.

I go to a bunch of user meetings on and off; they are usually held in malls or convenient restaurants, and are generally free-form, which translates to “everybody eats and then they go their separate ways”.

So, I’ve decided to start hosting dinners at this restaurant. I will call them “Rumspringas”, because I’m really frigging weird.

The idea is that they will be held on some evening, maybe a Sunday, and they can go into the night as much as people want, since the restaurant will be open until 4am. And I will organize talks, two people talking, who compliment each other, but don’t duplicate.

Anyway, I made a website to announce this for textfiles.com, and the site is http://rumspringa.textfiles.com.

If travelling to Boston is not a killer proposal for you, consider getting signed up for interest. If I get enough people, I’ll do it. And that would be a great way to spend an evening a month.

Well, Waxy showed his usual talent for sniffing out dropped hints and figured out that I referenced the BBS Documentary raw footage going onto archive.org over time. Since that little kitty’s out of the box, let me give clarifications.

I’m actually more concerned about releasing raw footage while the documentary is in “sales cycle” than I was releasing it under Creative Commons. Like I said in my rant-y essay about that license, I don’t see Creative Commons really impacting sales any direction but upward. A part of me, however, sees releasing the footage as impacting sales, since people might go “he’s releasing the documentary free!”.

Obviously, this is not the case; the thing you’re paying for is the editing, the packaging, the work I did, the convenience and ease of the DVD and so on. But still, I am concerned about perceptions.

There’s a lot of footage. A ton. I don’t know if people know how much. At least 250 hours. It actually might be more, but that’s the number I’m able to dash off. That’s TEN AND A HALF SOLID DAYS OF PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT BBSES.

The interviews are all over the place in terms of quality and subject matter. One of the most common criticisms for my documentary is along the lines of “you didn’t include incredibly specific subject in your film”. That’s usually because either one interview mentioned it as an aside, or maybe nobody mentioned it at all. If so, then it was very hard to fit things into the documentary on a cinematic basis. The documentary is just that, a film, a narrative movie about a subject. And that medium lends itself to certain aspects of story (human emotions, sounds, images) while not doing a good job of others (completist lists, endless talking, complicated issues that you almost have to have been part of to understand, etc.) and you have to take that into account. People compliment me on how well the editing flows… and then ask why I didn’t include a rather complicated subject.

So about these interviews….

Some interviews are basically monologues, with me in the room while someone talks with pretty much no prompting for a full tape. Others are “memory surgery”, with the subject and I working together to dredge out individual facts from hazy fogged reminiscences. The second type is somewhat hard to sit through.

These interviews will in fact be “edited for content”, but I think the term means different things to different people.

There’s a whole set of interview tools I use to get people to talk. In the case of people who just simply couldn’t know where to go next, I would tell them stories. In fact, I often told the same stories. I might tell the same story to a dozen people. But somewhere in there, they’d go “Oh, yeah! That reminds me!” and off we’d go again. I’m likely going to cut out my stories. I’m also going to cut out where, for example, I talk about how I got a flat fixed with AAA before the interview, or where we both marvel about the coffee. Trust me.

However, if we talked about BBSes, it’ll be in there, I’m not cutting out anything related to them, in any way. Some tapes will be 20 minutes while others are 50. It really ranged a lot.

Lighting and sound wise, things are all over the place as well. This is because, in some cases, I would have 10 minutes of “setup time” with someone who HAD to be out the door in 60 minutes. So I’d rush. Or I’d have 4 interviews that day, and the next interview was 150 miles away (this happened a lot). So I set things up, and they were pretty good, and there we went. In a few cases, I had people near windows and the light changed across a day. This is the price of a one-man crew.

I’m going to focus first on putting up the interviews with the people who didn’t ultimately make it into the documentary. This is about five people. In the background, right now, my laptop is digitizing my interview with Mark Nasstrom, from Seal Rock, Oregon, who used his BBS as a way to report election results for the town days before the town newspaper, which only came out once a week. We discuss Boardwatch extensively. We discuss what it means to have a BBS in a town where the phone lines rot from the salt in the nearby ocean (Seal Rock is a coastal town). We talk about a lot of interesting things, very useful historical information about BBSes, across the hour. So it’s fun to listen to.

I’d like the eventual entries for each interview to be as complete as possible. I will write out explanations of the interview, it’s context, the person. I will fill out all the forms it provides for me. But I wouldn’t mind it going further.

I would hope (but hope is all it is) that someone will consider transcribing the interviews. I hope someone considers indexing them. Maybe someone will even find ways to make something be able to search the video.

And more than that, my REAL dream is that someone will take my footage and use it in their OWN documentaries. Remember, it’s Attribute-ShareAlike licensed. You can use it. You can sell what you make from it. You have to release it under a CC license the same as mine, but hey, I’m doing OK financially, you can too, if it’s good enough. I would hope that all the people who complained about my focus on North American BBSes would consider using my footage as a foundation to record their own documentaries, interview their own country’s people, add their own voices to the record. That’d be sizzling hot. I’d be really proud.

Until then, however, we have this library of video interviews I’m building. It’s going to take me many months to get all of them up; I suspect I’ll be doing this well into 2006, on the side, slowly building this massive repository of BBS history, this huge juggernaut of interviews and footage with thousands, literally thousands of BBS subjects covered.

Before this project came along there was no real video footage of Ward talking about the first BBS. Now there is five hours. Before this project, you had to rely on heavily-edited interviews with Tom Jennings to see his take on his software. In the two hours of footage I have, there’s no question about his emotion and energy around Fidonet. Phil Becker, creator of TBBS? 5 hours. Jack Rickard? Two. And so on, and so forth. Voices raised, resurrected from the rich years of BBS history, speaking clearly, telling us these stories, for the generations to come.

How could I put a price on that?

Speaking of which, buy the documentary. My producer thanks you.

Update: It’s now up at http://www.archive.org/details/bbs_documentary.

I was browsing around for mentions of the documentary, and found a nice lively discussion about the documentary’s scope and range on a usenet newsgroup, alt.bbs.synchronet. Here’s the thread I found.

It’s an interesting one, because it kind of captures everything that I’ve really been proud of as well as most everything I’ve been criticized about with the documentary. It also includes the opinions of two of the subjects who are IN the documentary. That’s a nice change too.

Here’s the summary:

Good: Looks good, flows well, is professionally packaged, edited nicely, interesting to watch, faces put to well-known names, lots of stuff covered.

Bad: Misses subjects, avoids certain topics, doesn’t discuss BBSing outside of the US in detail, doesn’t mention XXX or YYY or ZZZ or (…infinite). Acts like BBSes do not exist in modern era, acts like they are history and not in the present. Clubs seals.

(Sorry, I made that last one up.)

Naturally, you can’t really do ANYTHING without criticism; there are no perfect films and don’t waste time thinking you can make one. What you do is make the best one you can make, put it out, and take the good and the bad responses together. If it makes sense to, you speak.

I’m reprinting my part of the discussion here, simply because it’s a good solid “statement” on my part about the work.

Hi, everyone.

So keep talking.

Apparently my weblog software goes to ‘blank’ if a number of factors happens, with the translation being that I have to have something up. So let me share this, which I found on flickr, and which I had nothing to do with:

Now that’s heartening.