I made the relatively hard decision not to have Vista in my home. This is tough for me, because I’ve been using Windows computers as my front-end to my stuff for over 10 years, and I have done an awful lot of work on that operating system family. Walking away has the potential to be difficult. (I should note that my system at my day job will probably be Vista, because it’s not under my control.)

But walking away is what I’m doing; crippling cards and drivers and messing up the whole user-OS balance in the name of ensuring access to the latest Adam Sandler movie doesn’t strike me as a fair deal. In fact, it has that heady perfume of a forced ass-raping, the coquettish sounds of laughter and snickering behind my back as I pay through the nose to have “approved” monitors and cables and who-knows-what-else so there’s a clearly defined red carpet for major studios to protect their little flicks.

There are professional/amateur whiners better suited to make the case for why you should or shouldn’t convert (upgrade’s not a good word here) to a Windows Vista system. I’m more interested in the meta-situation, that of changing your operating system and what that has meant.

There are computers you touch and computers you work on/own. If you define “own” as “it was partially or completely mine, and I did stuff on it beyond testing to see if it beeped”, then I have owned the following computers:

• Commodore PET.
• Atari 800.
• IBM PC (5150! I had one of the first 1000).
• Apple IIc.
• Commodore Amiga (500 and 1000).
• Macintosh SE.
• Sun 3/60, 3/280, Ultra 2 (COW.NET once ran on Sun 3s)
• SGI IRIS 3000.
• Six Billion Anonymous x86-based machines.

Obviously, as a computer historian guy who gets sent or buys an awful lot of old crap, I’ve “owned” a lot of other machines and my basement laboratory that I do my research in is what the experts call “chock full”:

But just because I have something in my house doesn’t mean that I can harken back to long-spent weekends or nights hacking away at the box trying to make things boot or try stuff out. Hence I have Commodore 64s, Lisas, Atari STs, Apple Powerbooks, TIs, and a whole other range of computerized doorstops, all waiting for their short moments in the sun when I boot them up to test a theory or try some donated software. You can rest easy, Fan of Your Chosen Old Computer, that I’ve definitely played with your favorite platform or machine. But when I say “own”, I meant it was in the bedroom or the office, not the basement or attic.

As should be obvious from the last few paragraphs, I love these fucking things. Just adore them. They’ve ruined my vision and they’ve horrendously inflated my sense of self-worth and social context, but it’s a fair swap. I’m fine with the damage they’ve caused because of all the weeks, nay, the years of what they’ve given me in return. The chances I’m going to wake up one day and go “Gaaahhh, what have I done, I have wasted my life” are very unlikely, at least as far as blaming computers for any of it. I state it clearly: I am a computer guy.

Therefore, what computers I’m doing “stuff” on are very important to me. I have been expressing myself using them for a quarter-century now; they’re an extension of me, of what I do, how I am known, and how I know. Sometimes they disappoint, sometimes they freak me out, and sometimes they have left me shivering in my chair, crying. But other times they lift me out of myself, raise my hopes, bring me dreams to join my own. I use them for communication, for entertainment, for work, for learning. And like any tool, I can react very positively or negatively to shifts in how a given computer “does” things.

It has always been possible to configure or change a computer to suit the user, but more often than not the user has had to configure or change to suit the computer. There’s a big difference between prodding around in the back of a circuit board to solder in a modification that lets you change how memory works, and plugging in a USB device that immediately adds a new port or peripheral.

In the rush to define themselves, home computers were more often than not “open” affairs, where the best and most successful plan was to focus on getting the things out cheaply and to as many distribution networks as possible, not to lock the thing down. There are, of course, exceptions to this everywhere, from the demand that Macintoshes have no slots to the artifical limiting of memory in Commodore computers to ensure future models would be purchased. But you didn’t feel, at any point, that the computer was “against” you, just that the company was being a short-sighted basket of fuckfruits to make a few extra bucks or cut down on maintenance calls.

But bear this in mind: if they could have, they would have. Texas Instruments tried to control the market for TI 99 cartridges so that you couldn’t have third parties come out with cartridges without paying TI. Atari sued the first third-party makers of cartridges for the 2600, Activision. (Activision won). Situations like this occurred in mainframe eras too, with IBM pounding the stuffing out of “IBM-like” resellers or vendors, or charging significant amounts of cash to “upgrade” a machine by removing a wire inside, unblocking access to additional capacity. What I’m saying here, is there’s no Garden of Eden situation with commerce and machinery/computational hardware, just periods when the greed hammer hadn’t yet pounded every potential nail.

That said, just because the situation has always been around, doesn’t mean you have to swallow it like a tasty gumdrop, either. If something you buy doesn’t work the way you expect it to, if it turns out that you were promised one thing or given another, or if you realize you’re being slowly cornered into someone else’s revenue stream and they’re pissing away freely into it, you can mostly say no. Or at least, you can try, and not just live in a constant BOHICA mode, getting slowly drunk on bad beer and thinking that singing along with songs on the radio constitutes freedom.

The vital situation, the step here that I think Vista finally took, was turning what was traditionally “your” computer and “your” operating system, and vitally shifting the total balance of power to where you were now a “user” like a junkie or lab rat is a “user”, not like a bulldozer operator is a “user”. You got voted off the island. You were charged for a membership to the club but you can’t use the steam room. Meetings you weren’t allowed to attend and which claimed to be in your best interest were adjourned and the minutes all said the same thing: Praise the user’s money. Fuck the user.

Windows XP, this previous revision, had a measure of dumbassery I could live with. It’d bitch like a kid who lost his ice cream cone when I installed certain pieces of software, but then it’d let me do it anyway. It would slow down noticably after a few days of being up, and occasionally would go into conniption fits when I happened to request a thumbnail of a movie with whacky codecs in it. But it was possible to go play whack-a-mole with processes and bring it back to some level of normal. And it was comfortable, and I could do stuff on it.

And like I said before, it’s not like this stuff hasn’t been creeping up, nesting, making little catacombs in your freedoms as a user of technology. You can point to End-User License Agreements and maintenance plans and nutbag intellectual property laws and all manner of maneuvers conducted over the past few decades. They were all there, but like a lot of people I mulled them like water buffalo down the hill, knowing in the back of my mind that those fuckers were eventually going to stampede and possibly trample over something I cared about. It was just a matter of when, and whether I’d be around for it.

Well, I’m officially around for it. So !VISTA NO!, if you please.

Some time ago, I started putting more and more of my efforts into working in FreeBSD. Textfiles.com is basically a BSD shop, with my scripts and programs for mantaining it all in BSD and with the applications that people connect to also in BSD. I rsync. I work in Perl, script in bash. A lot of my “work”, therefore, is not on the Windows boxes on my desk but downstairs on the BSD boxes or across the country on same. I’ve been splitting my efforts for years, in other words, spreading the love around, embracing computers but not just the one that plays a chord when it boots up.

So then the question becomes what exactly do I do in Windows? This is the calibration, the tough part, the self-assessment of realizing what I do. Here’s my list:

• Edit my video.
• Master DVDs.
• Burn DVD-ROMs and CDs.
• Connect to IRC.
• Telnet or SSH to other places.
• Web browsing.
• View PDFs and Flash Animations.
• Play music or movies.
• Write in notepad.
• Play demos or games.
• Variations thereof.

Immediately, we see stuff I can do equally well on a FreeBSD box: ROM burning, IRC, ssh, telnet, viewing PDFs/flash, web-browsing, writing in a text editor, play music or movies. There’s almost no definable difference between doing it on a Windows box and a box running a X server. The only reason I don’t do that now is because the Windows boxes are the ones on my desk.

The others are the sticking points. Video editing and DVD mastering persist because I’ve really grown comfortable with Vegas. I really like the way it does stuff. I like the speed, the ease, the way I work with it. I’ve grown comfortable with it. The demos and games, well, that’s because they’re written for Windows, right? They use the Windows stuff and so they won’t run anywhere else.

So there’s it. I am basically on Windows because I want to edit video and play a few games. (In marketing terms, these tasks/attributes are “sticky”.) That’s not very much, is it? If I got comfortable with Adobe (which runs on Apples) or any of the free video editing software programs that are getting progressively better, I could ditch that part of Windows. And the demos and games? Well, I could probably just watch the demos at work occasionally, or at a friend’s house, or something similar. That’s hardly a reason to keep around a system, just to play a couple games. Hell, if I got my hands on an old copy of XP (when it becomes old), I could probably just keep that in a separate partition, dual-boot or use a vmware-like thing, and then play the stuff that way. I’d have choices.

And there we see; a little time of thinking and I can know exactly why I’m staying and how easy it is to leave when I’m ready.

It took me quite a while to compose that list up there, racking my brains for what I actually do instead of just saying “I need Windows, so too bad about the raping.” I would start to consider what I thought was an intractable, Windows-only thing, and then I realized there were free programs, running in a BSD system, that did the exact same thing out there. Often better. (Sometimes not better, but good enough).

It is very uncomfortable distilling your life, your love, into a little list. But when you do it, you realize what’s really important to you, and you can step forward and make decisions based on facts, not hopes and rough sketches.

There’s a big difference between a vista and a horizon.

For reasons that become less clear with each passing day, I have a feed coming from Wired News. I think part of it is a nostalgia regarding how Wired used to be when I first stumbled upon it when I was 24, and the other part is that over time I’ve appeared in it. And don’t think I don’t appreciate that very, very much.

But in my battered and arrow-pierced helmet as Wikipedia Critic, I can’t help but be particularly galled by the efforts of one Tony Long, cub Wired reporter (actually, the Copy Chief), whose stories keep showing up in my feed reader, along with all the other ones.

I happened to click on one, found the article a little short, and then, at the bottom, the dreadful words: (Source: Wikipedia). Well now, that’s fantastic; next I’d be inspired to have (Source: Guy I Know). I simply assumed he was on deadline, had to shoot some thing at his editor to make them shut up, and then he’d get back to, you know, work.

Wrong. Here’s some articles from the last two weeks:

• Jan. 28, 1986: Challenger (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 24, 1848: Gold! (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 23, 1978: Pfffttt…. (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 22, 1984: Dawn of the Mac (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 18, 1911: Clear the Deck (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 17, 1985: Please Hold (Souirce: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 15, 1969: White-Knuckle Ride (Source: Wikipedia)

Notably, none of these articles are listed as being “written by” Tony Long; they’re marked off as “compiled by”, as if the Herculean effort of going to en.wikipedia.org and pressing Open-Apple-C deserves the same nomenclature as contacting a series of individuals to create a summary. Those graphs and charts in a newspaper that show clearly what happened in the last 20 years in a subject, or which show exactly which states have the most beehives? That’s compiling.

Obviously, newspaper journalism has a long and studied history of just yanking whatever comes down the newswire or which goes by on TV, and then just printing it, meaning something completely wrong or misheard can become canon. My favorite band, Negativland, did an amazing album about this whole phenomenon called “Helter Stupid”. Check it out sometime.

But even if this is the usual way of doing business, there’s something about the wikipedia angle that irks me. I think it’s the fact that the use of Wikipedia as the primary (and only!) source for an article is considered kosher enough to credit it at the bottom, and this is A-OK.

We do this everywhere: claim something is still being worked on, acknowledge it’s got some pretty major flaws, promise we’ll work them out in the future, and then dump more and more infrastructure on it. I guess it’s what people just do. But doesn’t mean I have to like it.

(Source: Wikipedia)

I had a very successful weekend in Colorado. I got to interview two interactive fiction authors for GET LAMP, and even got in an interview with an arcade owner for the arcade documentary. As previously stated, if I can fit in something for ARCADE, I do it, but never at the cost of a text adventure interview. This is why when I was just in Chicago, even though it’s the center of the coin-op universe, I only filmed text adventure authors this time through. One of the Colorado-based IF authors, Robb Sherwin, was kind enough to point out the existence of the Lyons arcade near where I was filming, and after some contact with Kevin and Carole Carroll (the owners), an interview was arranged the same weekend.

If you don’t want to wade through a bunch of paragraphs being sold on this place and why you must immediately buy a plane ticket or get into your car and go there, I’ll just give you three words: Joust Pinball Machine.

Only 402 were ever made. All of the surviving ones are in the hands of collectors. It’s one of the rarest machines to find. And you can walk right in the door and play one. I swear to you, I was sure that I was going to take a dirt nap long before ever getting near one, much less be given the opportunity to play one. Not only did I get to play, but Kevin gave me a tutorial and matched me up against another regular, so we could go head to head. Oh, did I mention the Joust Pinball Machine is a head to head pinball machine? You might not have known that, which I inferred because you’re still reading and not in your car driving directly to Lyons, Colorado.

Lyons Pinball is the dream and family business of the Carrolls, who were inspired to open it by the sight of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. This isn’t some worn-out busted pinball hall gripping onto its last days; it was opened just 4 years ago, designed from the ground up to be a primo pinball location. The arcade is open 4 days a week; Kevin explained to me how they spend the “closed” days performing maintenance and upkeep on the roughly 40 pinballs onsite. Their policy and promise is “100% maintained”, which means that when you walk up to a machine, whether it’s 10 years old or 40, it’s going to run properly and not ruin your game with a stuck bumper or broken flipper.

The machine selection’s great; besides a wide range of pinballs including Black Knight, Theatre of Magic, Cyclone and Eight Ball Deluxe (Limited Edition), they have the almost impossible-to-find-working Discs of Tron in an environmental cabinet, as well as the equally-rare fully-working Hercules by Atari Pinball, the largest commercial pinball machine made. (It uses a cue ball for a pinball).

Here’s a couple screengrabs from the interview, with Kevin in them, next to a few of those well-maintained machines.

Wait, are you still here? When’s your flight?

Like a lot of people on the web since 1993, I have a semi-static defunct webpage about myself located on my cow.net website. (I think the fact I own the domain COW.NET also indicates how long I’ve been around.)

On the COW.NET page about myself, I welcome people who are browsing, and invite them to “buy the T-shirt”. This was just a throwaway statement, a little joke. Sometime later, I heard about this new company called Cafepress, which takes your images and allows yourself or others to purchase items with those images on them. Since I thought this was pretty funny, I created a “Storefront” with a Jason Scott image.

And then promptly forgot about it.

Almost seven years later, I got mail from Cafepress, saying “You really need to clear up your mailing address and some other account information before we can pay you.” I went and checked, and I guess I was owed money for all those sales! So I filled out the crap and then forgot about it again.

This week, this showed up in my mail:

Drinks on me!

Vaguely avid readers might note that I do my best to avoid fad jargon, those phrases that weblogs like to use to seem hip or at least cynically superior to others by keeping track of whatever twisted refashioning of language is hot this week. I sometimes fail, of course, but I really do my best.

However, I can only imagine that a certain percentage of people would look at my mad sack of cash and say “That’s the Long Tail at work.”

If you’ve not heard the phrase “Long Tail”, therefore, let me summarize it as best I can: A guy from Wired is making a living selling people a fucked-up bell curve. Or, if you prefer, we’ve acquired a new messiah who says, in book, weblog, magazine and audio form, that Given Enough Time, You Will Eventually Sell All Your Stock.

The “long tail” is the slow, steady trickle of people wandering into your virtual (or real) storefront weeks or months or years after you set up shop, and finding that they still want your product. If you make a graph of sales, this drawn-out plateau/line resembles a very long “tail” attached to that sweet, sweet lump of sales at the beginning of the graph.

If reading about it makes no sense, don’t worry; there’s a website, article, book and walrus all explaining the concept in intricate detail. OK, fine, the last link doesn’t give you anything but a walrus.

I mostly ignore this whole fad because it has the same attributes of a lot of classification fads, that is, a lot of obvious statement followed by a branding which is then used by person or persons capitalist-minded to cash in on the resulting rush of interest. This is how downloadable recordings became “podcasts”, adding a comments section became “peer-to-peer collaboration”, and how, way back in 1998, removing the “(y/n)?” from downloads became Push Technology.

Unfortunately, I’m now seeing it leak into an area I care about, namely, moviemaking. Long Tail Wired Dude made this entry about making a “Long Tail Movie”. As far as I can tell, his brilliant idea is to make shitty movies cheaply and make back the meager budgets by never throwing away the stock.

Because what we need are more people whipping out lame, fastly-produced shit and demanding twenty bucks.

The best part about “The Long Tail” as a “movement” is that, like Humpty Dumpty, you can make the word mean whatever you want it to mean. Anything where something takes a long time to run out can be a “long tail”. Any case you have trouble with sales after the initial curious rush of people is really a case of you exploiting the “long tail”. If you sleep with someone a lot and now not quite so much, your not getting some tail is part of the “long tail”.

I’m not saying the concept doesn’t have merit or isn’t in some way true; I’m just saying it’s another case of rebranding being used to grab concepts and then market them into the ground. If you recognize that this isn’t a revolutionary bit of thinking and is what it is, then have a great and fantastic time using the hot new fad jargon.

There, a blog fight. Where’s my posse? I gotta spend this mad Cafepress cash, and I’m all about the Washingtons.

I hated a lot about the middle school I was transferred into in 7th grade. This is good, because there really was so much to hate, and it was best to get started on that right away. But let’s focus on two things: computers and fear.

The school had a computer lab, like a lot of schools of its type, and in our case the lab was a locked room containing roughly a dozen Apple IIs with green-screen monitors along the walls, some long tables in the middle, and one Apple on a cart in the front that had its own monitor. This room also had a desk, which was a ludicrous addition, taking up valuable space, because this was the kind of school that figured a computer lab was just a classroom with computers in it. It was also devoid of any character; if it had posters on the wall, they were meaningless pseudo-educational crap. Or, they were something a school psychologist believed would prevent the students from stabbing each other. The view out the windows was of the roof of the school, a bunch of heating and cooling elements and the steam coming out of the cafeteria. This was not a fantastic place of computer presentation.

This bland little room was lorded over by a single teacher. I previously used nicknames instead of real names when referring to my teachers, out of some mutated sense of privacy and not giving them reason to sue me. So let’s just go with calling him Mister Slick.

I still remember Mister Slick, like a beating. Imagine circa-1979 Steven Wozniak with 1/100th the computer knowledge, the same grin and beard, and with a dash of sneering superiority… and you’re getting there. He was already Lord High Supreme Master Overlord of the computer lab when I started attending that school, and I want to speculate that he was the one teacher that saw these things coming in and offered to be the go-to guy for maintaining, teaching and working with them. I have grave doubts any of the other teachers wanted anything to do with the silly boxes on the second floor, and that they would bless and praise Mister Slick for taking the problem out of their hands.

His “real” classes were in Mathematics, where he’d cover the usual aspects of taking a bunch of numbers and making other numbers, a subject i’ve always been rather poor in. But he also taught computers, using these Apple IIs, and the combination of comedy and tragedy in these classes still haunts me.

It is a time-worn tradition for a person narrating a story about using computers as a youth to portray themselves as being the best at it and leaving everyone else around them, authority figure or contemporary, in the dust. So I will immediately say that there were at least a dozen people better than me at the school in all matters and subjects. I am not the fucking hero at the top of the heap with his sword held alight. I was probably in the upper percentiles but in the grand scheme of things I was just another 12 year old messed up nerd.

But I did like computers a lot. So that’s something.

The computer at home was an Atari 800 my mom had bought for me for the holidays one year. My computer at my dad’s house was an IBM PC. It was on this Atari 800 and the Commodore PET before that and the IBM PC that I’d been doing computer stuff. Before the Commodore PET came home one day, my dad used to bring home whacky little half-calculator half-computer things that IBM had lying around the research lab. I wasn’t able to solder or unscrew panels, but I could certainly handle my way around a dozen sort-of-operating-systems and do programming to an extent (in BASIC). I could also rip through the source code of other programs and do that very important surgical procedure of replacing all the status messages with profanity. So by the time I was transferred to this horrible middle school, I had about 4 years of computing experience under my belt.

This was, just to give some perspective, a time when you had to get a lecture about not touching the part of the floppy disk that was shiny. A time where you had to be told to keep the disk in the paper envelope that came with it so it wouldn’t get dusty. It was also a time when Mister Slick was offering to the students a special deal of just five dollars a floppy disk if they didn’t have one of their own. Just five dollars! Times a hundred students. Way to go, Mister Slick.

What I remember of my classmates at the time is the fear, that horrible, sickly fear that so many showed around computers. Most didn’t have one at home. Many were truly terrified of them, as one might be of an open flame or a handgun, convinced they were one wrong move away from disaster. Computers weren’t wonderous toys; they were vicious tools they would never master and which would cost them grades because the big Box of Mystery didn’t work in a way that made sense. Their eyes would grow wide when the floppy disk drive churned. “What’s going on?” would be whispered between them as it booted. “Did I break it”, “Is it supposed to do that.” “Please, you use it, I can’t type”. I still hear those voices, if I think back to them.

The thing is, I think a bunch of my classmates were proud of their ignorance. Not knowing something, in a place where knowing things was ostensibly the goal, was a twisted sort of accomplishment, especially if you could cull out a passing grade from it. It’s hard for me to really describe this pervading sense of accomplishment of non-accomplishment, but it was there, and I hated it. Learning was fun to me. To others it would just result in more responsibility, more things to get wrong, more things to not seem cool to your buddies with. Teachers like Mister Slick never seemed to get inside his students’ heads about this stuff, try to help kids rediscover how big and wonderful the gift of learning was. Rote memorization and dull lectures punctuated by surprise call-on questions were the orders of the day. Every day.

Mister Slick didn’t like me, and I didn’t like Mister Slick. He wanted everyone in the class to know nothing about computers, so he could proudly stand at the front of the lab and tell the groups of huddled students what GOSUB was and how to set a variable. He’d put out an assignment, like writing a program to convert temperatures (with the formula in the assignment) and then he’d slowly talk people through it. Unfortunately, his pristine lectures would be interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of my group chowing through a beta version of the assignment. Guess who was typing. Since Apples would beep occasionally, his haughty monologues would be interrupted by one as I did my best to refine the now-working assignment I’d finished in the first 5 minutes of class, ignoring the tapping shoulders of my terrified groupmates who were well and truly convinced I was doing some sort of satanic spells to make things function with this box of mystery. What he wanted was a room of dull sheep. What he got was 22 sheep and one somewhat-sharp sheep. God, did he hate that.

How much did he hate that? I was given a -20 for class participation in my math class grade.

Let’s cover that again. I was given a negative number for the class participation grade, chosen as such because it would drag my final class grade below the “passing” threshold.

Who does that sort of thing to 12-year-olds who are a little too far ahead in the class and a little too unwilling to sit around while the lectures cover subjects and programming skills learned years ago? Well, Mister Slick, apparently.

Ultimately, my parents angrily got the grade raised to 66, to make it so I wouldn’t have to take that class and possibly that grade again. I wasn’t allowed in that parent-teacher conference, but I’m sure it was as civil as could be, Mister Slick explaining in some amazing jumps of logic how a negative grade could actually exist in the educational toolbox, ready to shove into an errant student’s eye. I’m sure he smiled that winning smile of his the whole way, too.

Somewhere in here, I started work on a program called “Applejack”.

“Applejack” sounds like a cool keyword, which is probably why I started using it. Written in Apple’s default BASIC, this program started out with a pretty cool title screen (composed of percent signs and pound signs alternating) and a set of instructions and a cool blinky menu. I was interested in the chrome and the flash, and getting it just right so that it’d be funny and neat. I got to a few dozen lines, optimizing it, trying to get it to run fast and have lots of room for expansion. “WELCOME TO APPLEJACK”, it would say. “WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?” I tinkered with it, considered how to make it read and write to the disk, make it be able to take instructions to write itself somewhere and do something later, and maybe even check back with me, somehow. I had only a rough idea of what Applejack was about, and when I had time on these computers, I’d intently type this or that, testing, honing, practicing.

It is only now, looking back across a quarter of a century, that I realize what was going on: I wanted to write a computer virus. A virus borne of sadness, of hatred, of a feeling of powerlessness. A program that would listen to what I had to say, and carry out vengeance against the prideful ignorance I saw around me. “I’ll show them, I’ll show them all bwaa haa haa” is not a particularly complicated or insightful action plan, but like a toked-up venture capitalist, a twelve-year-old can sometimes forget the bigger picture in spite of himself.

Luckily for, well.. for everyone involved, really, Applejack stayed the way it was, a few forgotten boards nailed into a tree in back that could have been a treehouse, but ended up as nothing. An especially good outcome since the rough plan was to make the treehouse capable of levelling a city block. As they say in programming, Applejack never got any “teeth”. It was a empty vessel, ready to wreak havoc as soon as I finished writing that pesky “havoc” piece that was missing.

I had so much rage back then. Rage and loss of hope. Most of my classmates, however, had no rage, just fear and lack of perspective. This was 1982. I’ve seen articles in the last decade or so talking about how schools have “changed”, how kids are “different” and new measures need to be implemented to handle this current generation which is more illiterate, more violent, more in need of drug therapy than any before.

I don’t know; I think it’s the same old feelings in a world where communication is now as common as water and air and electricity. Just another resource, another thing you can just yank into your teenage world on demand. I don’t think the kids are different; we can just hear them better than ever before.

I hope someone’s listening.

Yes, somehow I’m still finding the time to continue efforts on Blockparty, the demo-party-in-the-US that I’m an organizer for. The website has a bunch of information about it, and further updates are happening shortly. Avid readers of this weblog will recall that I went off about this big project just a short while ago.

If you heard about this thing from me and are on the fence about whether to attend, this is your best time to come to the logical conclusion that attendance is mandatory. Because the hosting event, Notacon, has a tiered system of tickets with earlier ones being cheaper, it’s totally in your best interest to buy tickets now.

So much for shilling. Now let me give you some good reasons to go.

We’ve not been sitting around, hoping everyone will grab a party hat and truck on down fueled by pure faith; We’ve been burning up the phone lines and e-mails trying to get some demoscene-related speakers to show up. And man, has that been working out.

To introduce people at Notacon as to what the “demoscene” is, we’ve brought in Andy Voss, “Phoenix” of the group Hornet. He’s one of the top experts about the history and story of the demoscene, certainly in this country. And with over a decade of playing an active role in his own right, he has a lot of credit and stories to his name. He’ll be giving a talk called “Allow Me To Demonstrate”, which will serve as a primer on what all this stuff is.

We got our hands on Andrew Sega, who many people within the demoscene know as Necros. You know someone was a memorable musician when they have shrine websites dedicated to them. I first saw Necros at the NAID event and was blown away by his presentation. Now, 11 years later, he’s been brought back to share his skills.

One of my best buddies, Trixter of Hornet will also be appearing talking about his jaw-dropping technical tour-de-force “8088 Corruption“. He took an IBM Model 5150 (that’s the first IBM PC, 4.77MHz CPU and all) and made it show full-motion video and accompanying sound. (!) He’ll be bringing the machine he did this on and throw everyone into an old-school tour-de-force.

What I’m saying here, is we’re going to make this an amazing time. It’ll be worth the trip. So start pencilling in your end of April.

Here’s the order page. Help me and the rest of the team make this a party to remember.

Oh, and as people are likely finding out, I just spent a full evening rebuilding this weblog from the ground up. When you’re getting contacted by web celebrities that are complimenting you on your writing and telling you to change the fucking fonts, it’s occasionally nice to listen.

I am posting Quag7’s amazing entry in the 80sBBS mailing list on my weblog, because of the sheer amount of work and thought that went into it, and the issues it brings up.

---

About 6 months ago I took a tour of approximately 40 modern BBSes. I had a nice HTML article I was writing up but then I didn’t really know where to publish it.

So, while I have my thoughts together, I figured I’d write them up here.

I called these bulletin boards to try to get a sense of the state of the BBS scene. I wanted to see not only what people were doing, but to figure out why they were doing it.

One of the first things I noticed is that a lot of people run boards today for nostalgia. Sysops put their systems up to relive days gone by. And Isuppose there’s nothing wrong with that, except that, it seems to me, this ensures that the scene stagnates. There’s a difference between retro and retro-cool, and most boards I telnetted into were the former – dusty museums, so to speak.

It may well be that that is the fate of the BBS scene going forward. Some would say, perhaps fairly, that that is the just fate of bulletin board systems, given the modern internet and its offerings. I haven’t made any conclusions about this myself, yet.

I am an advocate of the modern age, and of the future. The past is valuable because it got us here, and everything in the future builds on the present and past. I enjoy a little nostalgia like everyone else, but the reverie of these little sojourns into the past does not last long, and it is not enough to sustain me.

To the extent that boards out there now are museums of sorts, many of them succeed in that regard. The problem is, if the boards I telnetted to were at all typical, most of them lack any kind of activity.

I noticed:

Stock Wildcats. For Christ’s sake, stock Wildcats were a scourge even during the BBS era, and they are mind-numbing now. I’m not sure what the pleasure is in running an unmodded stock Wildcat, other than…

A nostalgic concern with doors. There are dozens and dozens of boards out there running a lot of classic doors. And that’s fine, except most of them, like the boards they are connected to, have almost no activity.

I see dead, tumbleweed-strewn Fidonet echoes. This is particularly depressing. If one thing should have survived and should still be vibrant, if the BBS scene has any purpose in 2007, it is Fidonet.

Lots of BBS networks that have no reason to exist, as far as I can tell. I’m surprised anyone still bothers.

In short, to sum up – far too many BBSes, far too many networks, far too many echoes/subs on those networks, far too many classic Doors, and not enough users.

Perhaps this is not news to most of you.

From time to time on this mailing list, the question is asked, what can be done recapture the spirit of the BBS age?

“It is said that what is called “the spirit of an age” is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world’s coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today’s world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” (This is from the movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, quoting from the Hagakure. When this quote appeared in the film, I thought of two things – BBSes, and the 1960s)

This is a sad truth. But I also believe that things can evolve, and elements of every age can be recaptured, reprocessed, translated, redefined, and improved.

I sense – and this is just my own personal experience – that while the internet affords far greater resources than any BBS ever did, a few things are missing from it, and over the years, some of these issues have been commented upon here.

I would not want to go back to a time before Wikipedia, Google, Google Earth, IRC, YouTube, and so forth. (Though I would like to see things like MySpace blasted right the fuck off the internet, but that’s a whole other rant).

One thing about every BBS I visited, was that it was refreshingly free of spam and banner ads, and there was a notable dearth of the subliterate knuckle-draggers you find on sites like MySpace.

I am still not a big fan of web boards. I realize that they are now the way the vast majority of the internet communicates, but they have problems (some software is better than others).

Frankly, I still think nothing beats a good Usenet client for public messaging. Some BBSes had some really usable subs, in terms of the BBS software, and I did like the navigation on those. Unfortunately, the only messages on most of these subs were from sysops.

One thing that paradoxically seems to reduce the usefulness of boards is the fact that they are accessible from anywhere in the world. If you had offered me this capability when I was a sysop, I would have jumped on it. But unfortunately, this has somewhat diluted the novelty of BBSes.

Every community needs to be built around something. H/P/A/V/etc. and pirate boards never had any need to be local; in fact, this worked against them to a large degree, because there were only so many people into these things in any local calling area. Many of those boards succeeded, though, because they had a common interest which built communities across wide geographical spaces.

Most of the boards I remember enjoying had a lot of local users. They lived in towns nearby or even went to my high school. There was a common frame of reference for schools, people, roads, towns, and so on that you could build a conversation on. It was possible, therefore, to put up a PCBoard with a name like “Somerset County PCBoard” and build an active user community around that, because at bare minimum, people lived in the same area and had similar experiences to build relationships on.

Most boards out there now seem to be unfocused; they’ll take anyone, and there’s nothing that particularly connects users. A lot of the boards are running stock or near stock, with few if any mods or even cosmetic flavor. There’s nothing that pulls like individuals together, and keeps them coming back.

I’ll ask the SysOps here – of all of the people who have ever signed onto your board, how many were one time callers, who never came back?

Running a board takes time and effort, especially if you’re running something paleolithic. You not only have to deal with hacks for internet connectivity, but also unpleasant extinct operating systems like MS-DOS in some cases. I
appreciate the effort involved, but on it’s own, it’s not enough, unless you’re just running a museum (which is fair; I don’t mean to bash anyone’s efforts).

On a personal level, and this just represents my opinion, I found that there was very little out there for me, personally. I was never a huge fan of door games, and probably 4 of every 5 systems that still exists, seems to exist solely for the purpose of running these doors. Message boards were dead. What else is there? File sections with a bunch of old shareware? I guess that’s interesting, once again, for nostalgia, but one website with all of that stuff would be more than adequate for that endeavor.

When I brought this up to a few people, I got a “What did you expect?” response – unanimously. I expected there to be a lot of dead boards, but I didn’t expect the whole BBS world to be in such a state. I guess I’m just naive or disconnected. I’ve been gone awhile, except for this list, and it’s only the yearning for something I can’t find on the net that brought me back, and brought me around to these boards.

Most boards have a bunch of echoes no one uses, along with multiple redundant BBS networks that have little to no activity. I assumed, for the first five boards that I telnetted to, that the echoes were simply broken, and weren’t updating, but after telnetting around and looking at the echoes on each, I came to the conclusion that most of the networked message subs really are dead. It reminds me of the massive sad redundancies on Usenet.

I tend to think of the peak of the BBS era as being earlier than most other people I’ve talked to. To me, 1986 or 1987 is the year that the scene was at its maximum and most vibrant, and possibly this was because the entry barriers were still fairly high (having the know-how to configure and keep a board running) and systems ran on proprietary 8 bit systems which required a fair amount of specialized knowledge.

Kids were still getting systems for Christmas, so there was a constant influx of new users each year. What I’m trying to decide is whether or not I consider that to be the ideal period because *I* was different, or because the online scene was different. I haven’t come to a conclusion about this yet.

But I miss the Spirit of ‘86; the sense of newness and adventure where you really felt like you were exploring every time you dialed into a new system. Often I get a little taste of this feeling late at night when I find some weird website or system to telnet into and explore. These are almost never bulletin boards, however, and they wind up being more novelty than anything else. They also lack people; characters.

I’m so bored with modern technical communities. I’m tired of looking at peoples anime wallpaper, reading about OS partisanship as an end of itself (OK mister FreeBSD, so you’re all l33t cos you run it – what have you built with it?)…

I’m bored of Slashdot, bored of people with big mouths and nothing new or interesting to say. It used to be that you could potentially get your ass kicked at school or get yourself banned if you were a jerkoff on a local BBS. Sure, there were adolescent war boards, but most of them didn’t last long. Sysops as cops, moderators, and appointed adults helped bring out the best of people or at least keep the screwheads at bay.

Now, though, it’s a bunch of little doggies with big barks and IPods and not much else. So many of the message boards I read are full of these loudmouthed, insulting jerks who piss in the rivers they drink from, because there are no consequences to being a complete boor. These people have always been around, but there’s no negative sanction for this behavior, and it’s become the expected way to communicate. Disagree with someone? Flame them. It’s not the abusiveness I object to – it’s the *tedium* of the abusiveness. I enjoy a good flame as much as anyone else. 99% of flames are just lame. Many are unwarranted, many are trolls, and many ruin whatever worthwhile was being discussed.

Bad signal to noise ratio. And I’m only talking about people who can form reasonably coherent sentences.

http://photos.imageevent.com/revolution/myspace/www_myspace_com-jakejekyll.htm

Too many guys like this. Too much crap like this.

BBSes, because of their nature, are petrie dishes where you can, at least in theory, grow healthy ecosystems of users (they’re not the only way – some decent moderation on web boards could also do it)…

I just think there’s an opportunity for a “back to the land” movement here…The benefits are growing quality communities of people, but also attracting people who have been online long enough to see the ways in which online communities can rot, and can do something about it before these problems metastasize.

RESUSCITATION

If there is any hope for the BBS world, there are a few things which I think need to happen, and again, this is just my opinion, and I’m open to other suggestions.

(1) Decide whether or not the BBS scene is worth resurrection. It may well be that the only purpose for modern BBSes are to be quaint museums; nostalgic tributes to the past run by people who were there. Certainly there are some superior technologies out there now which may be so substantially superior that they cannot be replaced or replicated in a BBS environment. So that’s the first thing – is there anything to be gained by attempting to revive a scene which is, for all practical purposes, dead? Does anyone have the time and energy for this? How many willing sysops would be willing to once again learn how to mod their boards and keep updating them on a regular basis?

This is not the same, as anyone knows, as updating a web page or writing another “dig me! I have an opinion!” blog (I’m not bashing all blogs, just 99% of them). So many blog posts would be fantastic as BBS posts.

(2) Consolidation. There are too many boards, too many echoes, too many networks, and not enough users. I have to assume that many people running boards are concerned with putting their name on something. What I’d like to see are BBS networks collapsed into one or two – preferably just Fidonet, and then perhaps a raunchier, more underground network. Within each network, redundant echoes should be consolidated, and dead echoes should be eliminated entirely. Aside from territorial pissings, I cannot understand why there are still a dozen or so BBS networks out there, given the number of users. There’s no need, for example, to have a dozen football echoes spread out across as many networks, when there is, at most, a trickle of posts to each. Choice is *not* a positive thing when its overall effect is massive dilution of activity to the point of extinction.

What we need is more collaboration. If anything, the free software/open source world has shown the benefits of such working relationships. We need to resurrect the concept of the co-sysop. Reasonable operating systems like Linux, the BSDs, and even Solaris, are free, and allow, at least in theory, people to work on systems in tandem, remotely. Imagine if you could have 8 or 10 developers/sysops working on each BBS, in terms of moderating message bases and, perhaps more importantly, extending the capabilities of systems through modding source code? What I’d like to see are collaborative boards with ten co-sysops and no Sysop at all. A collaborative effort means you can join forces, and well-structured teams of system operators could be greater than the sum of their parts. Plus, with all of the years that have passed, I’m sure there are some fantastic ideas that no one even thought of implementing during the heyday of BBSes.

Redundancy given the size of the BBS user community is one of the biggest problems out there now. There are way too many boards, just like there are way too many Linux distributions. This is true, too, of door games and the number of people who play them. It would be far better to have bigger games with more players on fewer boards than a bunch of dead games or games with one or two players like there are now. Pretty much every BBS seems to have the same uninspiring advertisement for itself: 400 FIDONET ECHOES (all dead), 29 DOOR GAMES (all dead), etc.

The question is whether or not those with the inclination to be system operators are likely to abandon their own fiefdoms and pitch in with others. BBS message networks in general have a long history of personal politics and egos, and frankly, given the moribund state of things, those egos are completely unwarranted. A duke in a wasteland is a duke of nothing at all. One possible approach to this problem is some equality among participants, or democracy where it can be implemented without utter chaos. Does someone always need to be the king? There are other ways of running systems. A charter/constitution is good place to start, which defines ways groups of developers or co-sysops can make decisions. Government of rules, not of men.

Heh, maybe I’m just dreaming. I’d be willing though. I can’t be the only one.

(3) Evangelization. Many newcomers to the internet don’t even know what a BBS is. There’s got to be a good way of bringing the right kind of people into the BBS world, and one way is to make BBSes retro-cool, rather than retro-nostalgic. In Jason’s documentary, one of the ASCII artists (forget who) talks about the apparent pointlessness of ANSI art – like, why would anyone take so much time doing that? Well, I’ve always considered ANSI art cool in the way great graffiti art is cool. I have a feeling that many younger people would find it fairly cool, that is, if they ever had a chance to see it. In telnetting around, I’ve seen some really cool ANSI art out there (some of it original, some of it purloined from art packs). Quality ANSI speaks for itself. It could be used as the signature of the BBS scene, because there’s nothing else like it on the internet. I’d like to see advertising for boards in the form of ANSI screencaps, but I’m sure others have other ideas as well. I think ANSI makes a statement, and good ANSI is still fairly remarkable to look at. And in a way, with ANSI, the medium is the message in the most essential way. It’s fairly startling to look at now, because it looks so much *unlike* stuff you see on the web.

As far as I know, all of the major operating systems have telnet clients, the basic interface required for modern boards. Most people don’t know they have it, and if they do, don’t know what it does.

There’s got to be a way of making people aware of BBSes, but there’s also got to be a compelling reason to get people to use them.

BBSes need to evolve….Which brings me to #4.

(4) A technological “Great Leap Forward” without the negative connotations of that phrase. Bulletin board systems ought to be more MUDdy and less menu-ey. There are some old technologies still in use on many of these systems which serve no particular purpose, such as ZModem, which telnet clients don’t support anyway unless you’re running a specialized BBS term. I can think of some interesting ways NNTP can be used for message bases, FTP or HTTP for file transfers, and IRC for chat…I’m sure there are developers with better ideas than me. The main thing which makes a BBS is the linkage of these facilities together – a BBS is generally nothing more than a message base, file base, chat system, and maybe doors and a text file database, all under one roof, with nice pakaging. Web interfaces for most modern boards provide facilities for these things but they don’t do it very well (IMHO).

As others have suggested (and I agree), a sense of “placeness” is also essential to a BBS. We have the computing power and multi-user capability to develop this sense far beyond what it ever was back in the 80s and early 90s.

There ought to be lots of easter eggs, interactive, realtime online games, and other such facilities. Some kind of standard for writing these new things needs to be developed. Ideally, there should be a lot of extensibility with low entry barriers. The first software I ran, C-Net, was fantastic software – all of the essential stuff was compiled, with a lot of the stuff in Commodore BASIC so it could be modified. I’d love to see some kind of standard such that doors could be written in Python or Perl, using libraries and classes to interact with the BBS software (I haven’t looked too close at this in recent years; I’m not sure what’s going on with doors, so if I’m talking out of my ass or this is already being done, apologies in advance).

(5) A worldwide summit of what is left of the BBS scene should take place, and this should be online. That is, if anyone is at all interested, and everything I’ve written in this essay has been written with the assumption that people *are* interested. We need to have some kind of mailing list, or perhaps IRC channel, and we need to figure out ways of better working together if this scene is worth saving. In theory, most of us are old enough to be mature enough to set aside some of our differences and pull together to resurrect the scene – that is, once again, if anyone is really interested in this – which remains to be seen.

I was surprised, frankly, at the number of BBSes which remain. I was under the assumption that the number of people who would have any interest in running a board would be a lot smaller.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there are too many BBS lists, going back to the consolidation issue for a moment. A lot of these exist because people have been publishing these lists for years, or because all of the boards run certain software. I would really like to see consolidation in this regard, and have those who run lists now become co-maintainers, or whatever they need to make it worthwhile for them. It’s simply too hard to find boards to call. And BBS lists which exist often don’t provide enough data on systems, such as a mission statement or what they offer. Frankly, too many sysops haven’t thought about that too hard, either. It’s worth doing.

CONCLUSION

All of this is based on the assumption that anyone is *really* interested in putting the work in to resurrect the BBS scene, and I do think the scene really is dead or nearly so, and continues to sink into obscurity. It may well be that it’s time to admit it’s dead, and simply accept the fact that most boards are museums, and that’s all there is to it.

But something keeps gnawing at me. I’m as pro-internet as it is possible to be. I am astounded at how things have turned out. I’m old enough to still be amazed at what’s going on out there, and I am as immersed in the internet as it is possible to be. I spend a lot of time here. I think I’m qualified to have an opinion on things, on this, my 23rd year online.

And I have found nothing which replaces the BBS. I’ve found things which replace parts of it, and many things that BBSes simply *couldn’t* do, but I miss bulletin board systems nonetheless.

As I said earlier, I am not sure whether this is simply a form of unshakable nostalgia – because I was young, and alienated, and bored in the suburban monoculture I grew up in, and at the time BBSes were an escape from that, or because truly, something is missing – something the internet should have going for it, but doesn’t. Usenet used to have a little of this, but even that’s dried up in most places. Spammers haven’t helped, and fewer people want to put the effort in to moderate, or at least try to lock out people who having nothing to contribute but crap.

I don’t have all of the solutions, just a sense of what needs to be done. On several occasions, I’ve considered putting up a board again, but I download the software, and then think about the complete lack of activity on most of the boards I called and ask, “Why?”

I look at my Linux system and wonder why there’s not more BBS software available to run, software-wise, and I consider the potential for massive collaboration on multiuser operating systems such as this. I consider the amount of free tools, programming languages, and documentation out there, and it really makes me ask, what if? So much of what’s out there now provides collaborative facilities we couldn’t have even dreamed of back when. I rarely even write scripts on my local system; almost everything I do at work or here at home is done via SSH on a remote system.

I have a hard time figuring out what others think about all of this because so many of us (this list is an example) are involved in the past, and documenting and preserving it. That’s important; that effort needs to never end, but I have to wonder if there’s some kind of future in all of this – a movement, really, that just needs a little hand to get started.

I am interested in anyone’s comments on this – feel free to reply to me here on the 80s BBS list.

I think the first step is that summit I talked about. I think we need to have a talk about the scene and find out if anyone has the energy or interest for this. Fair enough if no one does. My own sense is that it’s going to take a lot of people to pull this off, if it’s worth doing at all, especially when it comes to consolidation – if my sense of needing to consolidate is correct at all.

If you know anyone beyond this list who is interested in any of this, feel free to forward this on.

- Quag7

I often get updates to the Historical BBS List I’ve been maintaining since 2001. Sometimes it’s just changes in time span or sysop name; other times it’s the addition of an essay or story someone remembers about their own or someone else’s BBS. I get, now, five years later, an average of 4-5 every day.

One that recently came in was for Devil’s Dungeon BBS, which his brother sent with the following paragraph:

“Don DeLapp Jr. & Don DeLapp Sr. worked together to launch Devil’s Dungeon back in the early 80’s. Starting out on the CPM with 300 baud modems. Eventually they upgraded to 1200 baud on a IBM/Compatible. Dedicated phone line, and many late nights coming up with .ans artwork using TheDraw.exe
The BBS almost went down after Don DeLapp Jr. was killed in 1987 by a drunk driver (http://www.jimdelapp.com/d/deaths/Death.htm) I am his brother, and at the age of 10 years old I would not let my father put the Bulletin Board to rest, we renamed it to Don’s Dungeon which is written on my brother’s headstone at the Holy Trinity Cemetary in Webster, NY. Later the name
changed to Space Quest, and other’s started up Space Quest II, and III, Black Cauldron) I recently snagged some information off the old BBS 5.25 inch disks (http://www.jimdelapp.com/d/files/BBS%20Days/) Recently Don DeLapp Sr. died, but their memories remain. Live long & Prosper.”

It’s not every day someone sends me such a complete story about the people behind a BBS, and it’s certainly an even rarer event to have someone send along a vintage photo of the sysop with their BBS in front of them:

So this is Don DeLapp, Jr., who was born on Sep. 23, 1971 and died on Aug. 7, 1987. As referenced in the paragraph his brother sent to me, Don was killed on his bike at the age of 15 by a drunk driver. This resulted in his father wanting to shut down the BBS and his brother, 10 years old, convinced dad to instead rename the BBS after him and keep it running in Don’s memory. It’s quite something to ponder how that conversation must have gone, with a father mourning the senseless death of his son and his remaining son pleading to continue on what the eldest son had started, even if it was something as simple as a computer and a phone line.

But what really stunned me was a photograph of Don’s headstone, which shows, clearly, the BBS immortalized along with him:

The way things work with web pages and web forums today, it’s too easy for one of these “communities” to yank up this photo, put it out of context, put it on a “silly gravestone” collection or otherwise dehumanize and detract from what’s really going on here: a family trying to make sense of the loss of their son by etching into his gravestone the things that defined him as a person up to that point. His drums, his portrait, his computer project that must have been endless hours of intensity and fun for him.

All Don had known was the world when BBSes were the way to do things. He never got to see the increased speed, the world wide web, the great stuff that came after; he’s locked, like so many others I could name, in the way things were back then, and how life was lived online. And now, set in stone, the importance of the BBS in his life is there for all to see.

In December of 2006, Don Senior died during an operation and was buried next to his son’s grave. Co-sysops, forever.

So that’s the question obviously being posited on this weblog: can I create something worth reading, roughly six days a week? I’ll end up getting behind, but I intend to keep this up until I run out of things to say, subjects to cover. I’ll try not to repeat myself, try not to fall into the typical blog blandness of dropping names of friends who you couldn’t possibly care about. I’ll try and avoid using terms like “lazyweb” and “intarwebs” and “me like” that people who are hip and yet not hip use to show they really don’t care about expressing themselves beyond demanding things of strangers.

Why take on such a possibly punishing schedule? Because I like challenges. Because I obviously like writing. Because I need to get into the habit of writing well, and doing so in volume. I have books to write, essays to write, articles to throw in other directions. I have ideas that need refining.

But most of all, the idea of six days a week of writing without repeating myself scares me. I use fear as an indicator of “good idea”. This doesn’t work with, say, testing the safety of equipment. But it works pretty well for projects. If I sprinkle a little fearful idea here and there, I find the project is better.

Along with this will likely come a little bit of a redesign of some sort. I don’t currently intend to change the white-on-black coloring scheme; there’s just too many complaints from people, whining I don’t look like Everything Else, to just fall for that yet. But maybe I could stand to have some sort of option where you could change the colors for yourself if you’d prefer. The formatting breaks on the page, renders wrong; I should sit down and fix that. I should do a lot of things, and having constant new content will inspire me to try to fix it up for the better.

The fundamental question, of course, is do I really have all that much to say? I honestly don’t know.

I guess I’m going to find out.

It’s about 11pm when I’m finished talking with David. The interview started at 7pm, with me unpacking all the equipment and setting up the shot the best I could, and then interviewing on and off for about an hour. Then I packed and we talked about text adventures and future ideas and the production, and as it got to be later, he was worried about the oncoming snow and the time I had before me to drive.

I never like to leave if there’s still stuff to talk about; some people I may never see in person again, and there’s nothing better than rushing headlong into subjects and ideas with someone you have no preconceptions about, no knowledge of what they know or don’t know, no limits. It’s great, and I never walk away from that if I can help it. But that time had come.

The next interview was Scott Adams. Scott Adams co-founded Adventure International, the first company dedicated to selling games. There’s a few guys selling games here and there before AI, but not with a full-time staff like Adams and not with the lasting, permanent effect on the genre of adventure games as his company had. Scott was 169 miles away, and it was starting to snow.

I’d thought ahead, having heard the weather reports, and rented a SUV with all-wheel drive. It guzzled gas a bit but it also had less chance of ending upside down in a snowbank.

169 miles, due west, into Wisconsin, and then 169 miles back towards my flight out of Chicago. 348 miles, give or take, to do one interview. To some that’s a lot. To others, not so much. But it’s nothing new to me.

I found my limits during the BBS Documentary: after about 300 miles in a single day, I start to get goofy. I try and keep it below 200. This was much less than 200, so I was in good shape.

I’d been up since about 8am, after having going to bed at around 3am. 5 hours of sleep, not so hot. Dave was my second interview of the day; I try to pack these trips up with 2-3 interviews a day, to get the full value out of the airline and hotel costs.

I got off to a wrong start, missing my turn off and driving through the Illinois countryside for a while. I got a hold of Interstate 88, which wasn’t exactly the interstate I wanted, but it went west, which I definitely wanted to do. By midnight, I’d found a rest stop which had a map that could set me in the right direction. 169 miles was starting to become closer to 200.

I got sleepy somewhere, and pulled into some sort of parking lot full of construction equipment, next to a 100% automatic/non-manned gas station. Kind of weird, that was; no place to buy soda or snacks, or a sad looking person sitting behind a cash register: just the pumps, bright lights, and the infinite darkness in all directions. Street lights get a little rare out there.

I slept fitfully for about an hour, my little tank of a truck nestled near a landmover, then shook myself awake and refilled my gas, just to be sure in case I never saw a station before my destination. You can never be too sure, and the fate of James Kim was too fresh in my mind; I had water and 5 cell phone batteries with me, not to mention extra food and clothes.

The snow got worse as I moved from an Interstate to 80 miles of Route 20; it started doing that thing where the flakes come at you in hypnotic, shifting patterns, where putting your beams to high give you slightly more view in the distance but also bring more of those dancing hypno-flakes. I had to start slowing down. 40mph, then 30. My 3 hour trip estimate started to seem slightly off.

The snow gathered on the road, and nobody else was driving around at 2am. The edges of the road were now gone, with a faint yellow line appearing below the white. I started driving on it like a Hot Wheels car, using that yellow line to guide me. Curves and hills started happening.

I tested the brakes each time, and each time the SUV slid a bit. Nothing crazy, no imitation of Curling, but definitely a sign that abruptness would not be a watchword.

I found that out when I finally drove through a populated town, that is, one that would be populated if it were daylight. It had actual streetlights, a number of hotels, and a lot of landscaping. Coming over a hill, I saw several things I didn’t like: a steep grade, a long distance down, and another car slowly going down both. I hit my brakes, and as expected, I started sliding.

I was now dangerously approaching the back of this car. I swerved into the oncoming traffic lane, which was luckily not living up to its name at the moment. I was no longer applying any gas. I was braking. But I wasn’t braking, I was a sled. So was the other car.

The two of us slid down the hill together, at 3am, in a silent ballet.

I gained control somewhere towards the bottom, and gassed it slightly, getting back into the intended lane. Another lucky shot, another disaster averted.

I landed in Scott Adams’ tiny town at 4am, found a hotel, and decided to avoid finding Scott’s farmhouse that night. I rented a room for the 6 hours I’d need it, and got all my stuff up the stairs somehow. Plugs awaited me for my camera, my laptop, my cell phone, my storage drives. I set the technology in motion, ready for the next day’s interview.

Scott Adams ended up having to drive into town to pick me up and haul me to his farmhouse; the roads were simply too impassible for someone doing a first-time drive into the area, and Scott was kind enough to make the effort to take me and all my equipment for the interview.

The interview was wonderful. I forgot how I got there, what had gone on. I concentrated on getting the story. Scott is not into interviews all that much, but he opened up a lot to me, gave me answers clearly, and helped me brainstorm some more. He was a perfect interviewee. Total footage: about an hour and 15 minutes.

The trip back, made in daylight and sans falling snow, was much less harrowing, and merely the 3 hours it should have been on the way out. Total driving time: roughly 8 hours. Total miles: roughly 390. Total for the weekend: roughly 500.

This is the secret part, the part you won’t see on the final GET LAMP movie. You don’t see these hours spent, these risks, these distances. You’ll just see Scott Adams say something, give some nice insight, and then off to the next shot, the next interview, the huge distances compressed to seconds, the hours of conversation compressed to a few lines.

The result, of course, is all worth it, every second, every slide.