Here’s a nice (unsolicited) recent review of the flick:

I cannot speak highly enough of this film, and when I heard that it existed I couldn’t order it fast enough. What director Jason Scott has done is catalogue a piece of history that is otherwise ignored by documentations. He’s chronicled the development, rise and fall of a big part of my adolescent life. Watching this film gives me an amazing rush of nostalgia, and I literally cannot watch it enough. Whenever I have nothing else to watch I’ll just pop in the DVD and pick out a couple random interviews. It never gets old because the subjects don’t let it. Each person has their own unique and interesting story to tell, and Scott does a fantastic job of not getting in their way and just letting them do it.

There are funny moments, intentional and unintentional, and there are poignant moments. Maybe it hits me more because it’s something I was involved in but it’s the most captivating documentary I’ve seen. I absolutely love it.

– http://www.livsaskadning.com/

Orders trickle in here and there. There’s still quite a bit in the attic, and since the sales from this are funding the current two projects, let’s hope it keeps trickling. I read all the mail sent to me and I try to respond to every single mail with a thoughtful response.

I’ll be selling this thing at the HOPE conference in New York City from the 21st to the 23rd of this month, July. I’ll also be speaking about documentaries, and about BBSes in general, at a couple panels. So stop on by. The HOPE conference’s website is at www.hopenumbersix.net/.

This interview was conducted by leahpeah.com last week.

The original is here: http://leahpeah.com/blog/interviews/jason-scott/.

Jason Scott, creator of Textfiles.com, has created an archive that is constantly growing and changing. There are always people sending in new files for him to place into the massive collection he started from nothing. Work of this quality is only found in labors of love. Part of the reason the archive is so huge, and continues to grow, is that the people contributing to it were at one time a part of a community much larger than themselves and welcome, very much so, when a person comes along and sets up a place for that community, or the shadow of it, to reside again. It feels a little like home.

For someone such as myself, who loves interviewing people and finding out what makes them tick, I was pretty much in heaven while I watched his first set of films, BBS: The Documentary, in which he speaks to over 200 people about their involvement in BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems). He’s a journeyman historian, yes, but not just that. He has a wonderful and insightful way of getting people to open up and talk about something that is, or was, so important to them, to their lives. He then puts the stories together in a way that makes sense, even for someone like me that had very limited knowledge of what having a modem meant prior to the Internet. I suspected that I would enjoy viewing it, but I had no idea that I would heart it so much. I eagerly anticipate the next two films he is simultaneously working on, Get Lamp and Arcade, even if they also take twice as long to create as he first thought. It’ll be well worth the wait.

Blog Birthday:

I kept a weblog before a lot of people, over here. So December 17, 1997!

Why do you blog?

These days, it’s several factors. For one, I have essays that don’t really fit anywhere. I used to have a “thoughts” page on textfiles.com, but it limited me to discussing the direct files on textfiles.com, and that got a little weird. Then I became a “guest blogger” on boingboing and got such a wildly positive response from people, I decided it was time to get myself a separate site, and ascii.textfiles.com came in.

What do you talk about?

Computer history, life lessons I’ve learned, things that amaze me, my own history, things that make me sad.

What don’t you talk about? Why?

I avoid politics discussions when I can because all it does right now is foster conflict and hate without any resolution. I keep my political actions elsewhere.

Worst/best experience regarding something you wrote in your blog or put out on the net?

All of my entries criticizing Wikipedia have caused enormous crap-storms that make me sometimes wish I’d never opened my goddamned mouth in public. It also confuses people to have this historian guy “against” something, which is how it’s usually interpreted, that I’m “against” Wikipedia. In fact, I’m against implementation choices in Wikipedia, choices that they themselves are starting to undo. It’s been a great time studying it, but jeez, come on, I’m more than a Wikicritic.

The best experience was the way my article about why I used Creative Commons shot around the world. It sold a lot of copies, but it also touched a lot of people.

Favorite/worst thing about living where you live?

I live in the Boston area. I enjoy the access to the wonders of New England, but I hate freezing. I would live in a warmer climate if I didn’t know it would basically cut me off from my family, who are very important to me.

When I first went in to look around textfiles, I initially felt overwhelmed. Is that a normal first reaction?

The site is kind of intended to be overwhelming. But it’s also an accurate reflection of what it is, a massive collection of files. I wanted to ensure it was all saved as well as possible. I created the “top 100″ so most people could just browse that and get the idea.

Did artscene come after the initial compilation of textfiles? Some of those files are the most interesting to me, coming from an art background.

Everything after www.textfiles.com came later, between 2 and 5 years later. The most recent is digitize.textfiles.com, which is scanned in ads and brochures. So it’s always growing.

Is there one thing that stands out regarding textfiles that you are most proud of?

I think it’s the best thing I ever did. It’s brought nothing but wonder for me.

What actor would play you in the movie of your life?

Either Bruce Campbell or Kevin Smith.

Do you think that your Wikipedia page speaks of you accurately and fairly?

Depends on the time of day, right?

A lot of it came from my own website. Some of it is incomplete, or inaccurate. Some is correct, and accurate. Whenever I get in the news about my wikipedia criticism, it gets modified a lot.

What do you do to stay sane and healthy?

Well, I try and eat right and read a lot. And make documentaries.

Did creating the BBS documentary take longer than you anticipated?

Yes, when I first started it, I thought it would be 2 years and it ended up being 4. So double my money. I wanted it to be 9 hours, and it was 5.5. But I thought it’d be 2 DVDs and it was 3.

Did it turn out how you hoped?

It came out even better than I’d hoped. When you work on something like this, you never know what’s coming out at the end, but this was a great final work, and it was all worth it.

How has it been received?

It’s done well, with thousands sold and many more downloaded. I paid off the costs of the film within its first month of release. But hey, buy more. www.bbsdocumentary.com.

Will you do anything different this time around with your new projects, Get Lamp and Arcade?

The best things I’m doing differently with the next two is to film it in HD and be more focused with interviews. I’m less worried about being the one and only source on these subjects. With the BBS one, I was often that very thing.

As for how it ends up, why guess? I hope it’s good. It all depends on who I can get to sit down with me.

Why do you make documentaries?

I make documentaries because I feel like I’m doing amazing good talking to these people. It never gets old.

Favorite color:

Blue.

Favorite food:

Swedish Meatballs.

In your opinion, what is the best application/widget/program or helpful-bit-o-code to come out over the past year?

A program to make my HVX-200 High Definition video camera work with Sony Vegas (my favorite editing program) because the Sony people are too bull-headed to make their software work directly yet. So this other guy went out and created Raylight, which does this work. That’s great. It was worth the $200.

Do you miss TinyTIM?

I miss TinyTIM as it was up to about 1997. Very much so. I wouldn’t trade those first seven years for anything.

When you were 10, what did you want to do when you grew up?

Make movies.

What do you hate?

Little tiny kings ruling in little tiny kingdoms that they think you’re standing in.

What do you love?

Making a difference.

What are you thankful for?

I have had the same well-paying job for a decade, allowing me the freedom to do all the rest of these things.

What do you want to tell other bloggers, if anything?

If you’re not generating original content and just regurgitating other links, then machines are going to replace you.

Astounding facts about you:

I’ve seen ‘Caddyshack‘ over 120 times.
I read every Agatha Christie novel in 30 days when I was 25.
I learned to drive when I was 26.

Are you Windows or Mac? Why?

I’ve been windows and mac at various times, as well as Atari, Commodore, and Apple II. It’s whatever worked for me. Right now, I run Windows XP with a collection of UNIX boxes doing the heavy lifting downstairs. I work best with PCs.

Do you cook?

If scrambled eggs count, hell yeah.

What are you working on right now?

A documentary about text adventures (www.getlamp.com) and a documentary about arcade games (www.arcadedocumentary.com).

Your own favorite post or essay you have written or contributed to?

I was very very happy with the Creative Commons post as mentioned above, but I’m also amused how a recent one about a lonely childhood called “The Best and the Interesting” got some nice response from the world.

What will you being doing next year?

Still filming my two documentaries, doing talks, travelling.

Tell me a secret?

I lost one of my best friends over a stupid thing, but I’m not sorry.

What do you wish I had asked you that I didn’t?

What I was doing for dinner sometime.

Thanks, Jason! (and what are you doing for dinner sometime?)

This weblog finally got a little thing attached to it: now you have to type in a keyword (it’s currently “ascii” but it’ll change) to post your comment. It’s a slight annoyance, relatively, with an extra weird step just to say something to me and to people who read this weblog.

But the fact is, I was up to well over 300 spammed comments a day on this weblog, and I nearly deleted an actual posting or two in the last week, so I finally got driven into this, or keep losing 30 or 40 minutes a day deleting stuff by hand. So I apologize in advance for the extra hoop.

Will this stop the spamming? No, but it stops the completely automatic, run-by-a-program-randomly-trolling-the-internet stuff. Which, like I said, was going to threaten to overwhelm my weblog.

People giving me the down-home spamming where they come on and jump my little hoop to sell you something, they’ll just have to get me deleting them back by hand. Like the good old days.

This is nothing like my e-mail situation, where because I have a very old domain (cow.net) and a few other high-profile domains and something like 10 years on the internet, I get over two million spam e-mails a month.

Is there a solution to this situation? Regardless of what people selling you stuff say, the fact is, no, unless you use some level of whitelisting, that is, you open up a tiny fractional vetted list of people who you wish to interact with and solely interact with them. I am not comfortable doing that, so I pay that price.

The flip side, though, is that people do neat stuff (interact, trade games, stream mp3s, and so on) without being totally crushed by outside forces. Spam will only go away when spam doesn’t work. Spam works, my friends. It works very, very well. Don’t think it’s being done for fun; it’s hard work being a 24-hour-a-day dick.

For my own bit, I’ve been watching cd.textfiles.com grow from my little funny site of CD-ROMs to an absolutely insane endless buffet by people coming on and downloading gigabytes a day. Gigabytes. One of the side-effects of there being over 130gb of data in one place is that statistically, some of that data’s going to end up having a use to somebody, somewhere. So multiply that by many thousands and I’m finding I’m showing up in “song searches”, “graphics searches” and so on, constantly bring crawled by Yahoo and Google (they can be very inefficient about it when they want to be) and sometimes just sucked dry by someone doing 30 simultaneous connections, like that’s going to speed things up.

I have stuff that, when you’re obviously connecting to me with many simultaneous connections, just blocks your ass out. I have to do it, or I couldn’t even do e-mail anymore. Someday cd.textfiles.com will get the same treatment as the main textfiles.com site or digitize.textfiles.com and live out away from my personal T-1, but right now, I watch the pain.

I was interviewed on FBILL Radio yesterday, through a Skype connection, and I had to shut off cd.textfiles.com to prevent my packets going to neverland. I watched the usage graph go to literally 2% of usage after turning it off for two hours. Popular.

I don’t get money for it. I don’t put ads on it, and people appreciate that and enjoy it, if somewhat silently. I think a lot of people just think these things are “there” for them, and don’t give a thought that somebody’s probably picking up the tab for their joyride. And you know, for most people, I’d prefer it that way. Why should everything be “brought to you” by some popsicle company?

But some people, I don’t know. They complain about my speed, they complain about me not having something they expect, and they demand I set things up a certain way for their convenience. Sometimes I can do it with no pain. Sometimes I can’t, and can’t wins.

For these folks, I have one thing to point out: the era of the website proving a point is starting to become history. Stuff is there because someone put it there, and if you get something without being bombarded by an ad, a pop-up, some malware or a credit-card form, somebody’s being pretty friggin’ cool. Tell them.

Heck, tell me. Your chance of your comment being lost in the spam just reduced for the time being.

I still remember her like it was just a day or two ago, instead of five years.

I was at a 2600 meeting in Boston. 2600 meetings are loose hacker get-togethers ostensibly organized or blessed by 2600 magazine, but which range wildly in approach, context, and usefulness. What they often serve as are ways to scoop up beginning technical folks and smash them headlong into a social scene they want to be part of but didn’t know how to enter. By having regular meetings, you are a sitting target for these new folks to find a place to be themselves. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not. I have been attending them off and on for 22 years.

She was new, or at least, new to Boston’s 2600 meetings. She sat down, black hair and dark eyes, and she quietly regarded everyone, occasionally engaging a couple people in conversations I couldn’t hear. I forgot what subterfuge I used to strike up conversation with her, but it was most certainly subterfuge and I didn’t know what we were going to talk about.

I still remember her pointed question, the result of an hour attendance in this food court with this rag-tag group of teenagers and 20-somethings.

“So.. what exactly do you all do?”

I started to burble out some generalized description of classic hackerdom, some half-hearted description of technical tinkering, and she stopped me dead.

“No, I mean what does everyone here actually do. What do they accomplish? Are they doing anything?”

This was not exactly the sort of conversation I was expecting, but hey, what the heck, let’s fly with it. I asked her what she was doing, hoping to hear either silence or something interesting.

She pulled out some photos of herself, on a park bench somewhere, covered in garbage bags and tied into some sort of bundle, with her feet in a bucket or some similar container. Her eyes were closed. There was someone sitting next to her on the bench, obviously a stranger, looking either bemused or confused, it wasn’t clear.

She talked about this art project she had done, where she had left herself as some sort of living sculpture at various parts of her previous city. She explained to me how she was trying to get people to open their eyes, to change the way that they looked at things. She thought that a technical group of people or hackers or whatever she thought we were would be able to give her new ideas, or team up, or do something. What she got was a bunch of quiet kids talking about what new crap they’d bought or some near thing they’d learned about.

She wanted action. She was getting talk.

She never came back to the meetings, and I’ve thought about her occasionally, because fundamentally, she was right. Talking is not doing, and planning is not doing, and sometimes even doing isn’t all that much in the way of doing.

One could laugh at Funny Bucket Garbage Bag Girl and dismiss what she was doing, but she had a plan of action, some theories on what it would do, and she had done it, and had results from it, even just photos. She had stuff, and she could show her stuff and incite others to either do better stuff or shut up.

I am, by some standards, an interesting speaker. I go all over the place, initiate non-sequitir, use profanity as humor and occasionally forget my place, but at the end I usually went somewhere. Some people hate that, some people like that. Enough people like it that I could probably just do speeches forever without breaking a sweat and continue to entertain.

But speaking is not doing. Criticism is not doing. Punditry is not doing.

One of the more interesting side-effects of my little sideline hobby of criticizing the Wikipedia project has been the evaluations of my character as a person, or of my intellectual stature, from people who know very little of my other work. To some folks, I’m just the guy who went off about Wikipedia and worked in the phrase “Katamari-Damacy-like Ball of Shit” into a supposedly intellectual overview. The reviews have been very helpful, but they’re just reviews of a performance, a classification or statement of my thoughts, unsolicited and distant, of the inherent flaws in the design of Wikipedia.

(On a side note, I’ve had the rare opportunity through this to feel the frustration of spending a year, on and off, learning a subject well enough to speak about it, and then watch as someone takes on the arguments with all the grace of muppets doing brain surgery. Normally I simply don’t throw enough energy in studying a subject to be able to mount anything other than a vague defensive position in discussion, and the potential to get “schooled” is great. Here, after my year of studying the subject, I’ve had to walk through a collection of forums, commentaries and writings where people obviously familiarized themselves with the first 8 words of every paragraph and then fired down the slope, guns blazing and helmet on backwards, ready to match wit. I say all this in my haughty fashion because 99 times out of 100, I’m usually the fucknut with the backwards helmet and the guns. It’s refreshing to get some perspective on the other side.)

Ultimately, of course, all most critics have done is provide a negation, a declaration of void against someone else’s efforts. While the rare critic is simply trying to provide context of a project or work in a greater timeline or schema, a lot of them are just whiny bicycle horns, uselessly bleating while others Get On With It. I kind of dread the possibility of becoming that.

So I’ve been doing stuff. But here’s the thing.

A lot of my stuff is very quiet. Very off to the side, a slow, incremental increase in data and collected material towards my general historial projects, including my websites and documentaries.

DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM has been growing, with more and more scans added every week. I’ve even written a bash script that generates an XML file of the new stuff being created. (Perhaps it was best you weren’t aware of that, so you didn’t have to hear the screaming.) I’m about to add some additional ways to browse the scans so that people can find what they were looking for a lot easier… at this point, there are 562 scanned pages!

This past weekend, I added some footage to the arcade documentary. I think you’ll agree with me that these screengrabs of some of the footage looks pretty good. I also made some contacts for future interviewees for that project.

And this past Tuesday, I drove down to a ferry, rode across the Long Island Sound, and interviewed the creator of what was eventually called Choose Your Own Adventure, Edward Packard. He wrote a book called Sugarcane Island back in 1969 that allowed you to make decisions in a story. You would turn to page 15 if you wanted to enter the cave or turn to page 20 if you didn’t. You either go “huh” or HOLY CRAP when I tell you that I spent a great day with this gentleman, interviewing him and enjoying a nice meal with him discussing the GET LAMP project.

That’s a very special kind of doing, and I feel blessed to have gotten the chance to do it.

I’ve been mailing out constantly to potential interviewees, and there’s sessions planned all this year. I’m still trying to contact even more, and expect to have well over 100 interviews for GET LAMP and who knows how many for ARCADE (ARCADE may outstrip BBS Documentary, but you didn’t hear that from me).

I’ve got a half-dozen interviews in the can. I’ve nailed sound and visuals to where I don’t have to sweat them out like I used to (but I still have to concentrate). The equipment and I have a little agreement going, and we’re a good team now. I am working. I am doing.

Films are generally slow-motion things, ones like mine even more so. Long after peoples’ interest flicker and look away, I’ll be interviewing, researching, editing. For years. It’s part of the deal, and one result is that people are just now learning I finished the “BBS Movie”. A few people have written me recently to suggest interviewees, even, unaware there’s two thousand of these packages in my attic.

I’m doing my little thing in the background, like others are, and at some point in the future, my film will bloom and flower and everyone will know about it, or at least a good number of people. At point, it’ll become obvious I didn’t just spent all my time tearing down Wikipedia or yammering about Funny Bucket Garbage Bag Girl.

But until then, I’m doing what I do.

Not just talking, not just criticizing.

Doing.

In case I show up in her article anyway, here’s my sum total of e-mail communication, in history, with reporter Katie Hafner of the New York Times:

Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:47:20 -0700
From: Katie Hafner
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Fwd: wikipedia story for ny times

> hi jason,
> i’m working on a story about wikipedia.
> would you mind giving me a call when you have a minute, at the phone
> number below?
> thanks,
> katie

—————————————————————-

Katie Hafner
The New York Times
201 Spear St., Suite 1560
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 836-6700

“I miss a lot of beats in music, but make up for it in life.” — Zoe Lyon

Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 18:50:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jason Scott
To: Katie Hafner
Cc: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Re: Fwd: wikipedia story for ny times

Katie, I am not one of your fans and am not interested in discussing this or
any subject with you. I suggest writing to Wikipedia Review or Wikitruth,
who are professional critics of Wikipedia.

Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:10:22 -0700
From: Katie Hafner
To: Jason Scott
Subject: Re: Fwd: wikipedia story for ny times

gee whiz. it’s not every day i get such a nice note.

thanks for the referrals. i’ll get in touch with those places.

all best,
katie