Only your buddies know exactly how to send you veering off the rails into completely well-tread, insane arguments that can last for hours or days if you let them. That’s why they’re your buddies. If they were your enemies, you’d be screwed.

One good discussion that just pokes my emotional hornet’s nest with a stick is the nature of reality in documentary form.

I know, it doesn’t sound overly exciting or even something to get even slightly cranky about…. but it’s truly fundamental, to a person telling a story in visual form from a collected set of images and recordings. If you pretend it’s non-fiction, it should be somewhat real. The problem that immediately rises up is what is real and what steps one takes in the process of going from reality to a documentary may or may not upset the “realness”. This can suck up hours. It’s a tornado of controversy.

Let’s get the basics out of the way.

Hundreds of hours of human life are spent recounting, to people either getting a film degree or who decided to take an elective class:

• When you shoot something with a camera, you have inherently made a choice where to aim that camera.
• When you start shooting, you have made a choice to record reality at that point, from that angle.
• When you stop shooting with the camera, you have inherently chosen not to record that reality.
• Later, you will assemble your shots, therefore making choices on what to shoot.

From these stated premises comes the following variant conclusions.

• You should be extra careful when you shoot a documentary because the potential to mislead and misdirect is so great.
• You should not be extra careful and just try to make a good film from the reality-based material.
• There is no such thing as a documentary as people think it means.
• Must Kill Michael Moore.
• Even though it doesn’t really show realty, it is possible to provide an accurate semblance of reality, as one would expect a news program to be.
• News programs are even worse because they make every attempt to claim they are reflective of reality.
• What is truth?
• What is reality?
• If anyone needs me I’ll be in my bathtub killing myself.

Personally, I buy into the idea that you can, utilizing care towards the subject and methods of filming, produce a relatively useful semblance of reality in documentary form. But it is so easy to mess up, and the reality you end up portraying may be totally different than what you ever expected your film to be about.

Documentaries have been around a long time, but two factors have changed in the past few years: Michael Moore and Digital Video.

Moore’s his own thing, and I do enjoy his films (even though Fahrenheit 911 shows a lot of earmarks of being rushed out the door), but they’re a different style of documentary, more Op-Ed pieces with video sidebars, couched together with really funny editing and a lot of moments of farce mixed in with claims of facts and situations and demanding/requesting people take action as a result of the statements in the film. This is a different breed of documentary than has often appeared before, and even the pre-Moore documentaries that do have a similar approach never got the worldwide attention his films do.

Digital Video, meanwhile, has dropped the cost of documentary shooting through the floor. I remember shooting with 16mm film (actual, spokes-in-a-line-of-kodak-film film) and the cost for me worked out, after development costs, to about $3 a minute. Compare that with an hour of Mini-DV tape which can record an hour for the same price. And you can re-use the tape if you screw up badly. And then, and this is critical, you can really really fuck with the final images really really easily.

Previously, manipulation of imagery on any scale beyond in-camera tricks or utilizing on-set manipulation to fake reality was prohibitively expensive. You could do it, but you had to have a lot of time, a lot of money and it was pretty noticable. That situation is no longer the case. You can change things on the fly, modify colors, fix up sound, and altogether make that sad little collection of 720×480 (or 1920×1080) frames do whatever the hell you want them to do.

So for my two little critical events, Moore and Digital Video, here are the outcomes.

People who are intent on deriding or castigating Moore’s assertions in his film have gone about it a number of ways. Some of them are simply to compare numbers or stated facts. Fine. But others have gone after whether his film is a “documentary” or not, where the edited sequences fall in real time, what full speeches the decontextualized statements come from, and the rest. And the thing is, almost no documentary can sustain that sort of attack because all documentaries edit. If you make editing an inherently evil process, then all documentaries are evil. And if you dislike choices made in the film about what to say, then you will easily find a pile of inconsistencies or omissions you don’t like. I contend that documentaries are no more or less flawed a medium than they ever were; the issue arising is laying an awful amount of load stress on a filmic architecture that can’t sustain it. Class dimissed.

Digital Video, however, is a much more intractable problem. Like I just said, the cost of digital video is so much cheaper than film ever was and digital video tools are now ubiquitous and amazingly powerful. Here’s some footage I shot out of a plane, which I then threw into a tool called “Deshaker” which is a plugin to a free tool called Virtualdub. It’s 12 megs and in Windows Media format. Sorry about that.

But the point, for people not wanting to download it, is that the original footage is shaky and a little messed up. There’s a small window in this footage showing it “after” I process it, where all my shaky camera work is gone. In other words, for free, I was able to eliminate camera shake, an ability the best-funded Hollywood blockbusters could not easily do through the majority of cinematic history. If you look for it, you can see shaking cameras everywhere in top-notch productions, because there was nothing that could be done. Now, for absolutely no cost, the image can be manipulated to take this problem out completely.

And there we have the lines I discuss.

We, filmmakers or people who just shoot video for fun, have at our disposal the ability to do almost anything we want to an image. Just a browse among Ryan Weber’s VFX Page shows how much you can do with hand-rigged effects combined with digital trickery.

So that’s the line. How much do you manipulate beyond even what editing does, and still consider your work truthful?

I’ll disclose that several things were done to the BBS Documentary digitially. Color correction occurred, fixing badly tinted scenes. Sound was punched up to make someone’s voice stand over the background. Boom mikes were digitally removed from scenes where they showed up in frame (it turns out the Canon XL-1’s viewfinder is inaccurate). I removed myself from reflections in windows and shiny surfaces. In one case, I removed someone’s stutter from their voice.

Do any of those cross lines? They don’t cross any of mine as I made the film. But they may cross yours.

My friends have done things in their films, and I have heard of things in the commentary tracks and message bases of other films, that I think cross my own lines. Adding items to shots. Indicating that two people didn’t eat together when they did. Indicating two people never met when they did. Having an actor play one part of an interviewee unwilling to be on camera. Omitting footage that makes concrete statements to prefer more vague ones.

But in our heated discussions, our back and forth, they don’t see crossed lines, don’t feel like they’ve hoodwinked anyone any more than I feel I’ve hoodwinked people by removing boom mikes. I’m so ready to stand on my own deceits and think that I’m doing the viewing audience a favor that I end up cornering myself into pointing at someone’s similar intent and crying “for shame” at them. That’s a crossed line too, I guess.

These are the things you think over, in your medium or sphere of choice. Little omissions, little constrictions or expansions, with the best of intentions, but the ever-painful situation of deciding whether or not you’ve gone too far.

As I work on the GET LAMP documentary, one of the things that keeps coming up is that Interactive Fiction/Text Adventures are a moving target. Even though to some people the subject might be closed and gone, trapped in historical amber, this just isn’t the case. There’s scattered groups of people composing, working on, and crafting new games and projects. I’ll probably go into a number of these in coming months as I wend my way towards the end of my production, but one of these projects is about to pop up, and if you have any interest in the subject, it would do you good to check it out.

Traditionally, and by traditionally I mean for the last 15 years or so, the standard interactive fiction project was a solo affair taking months and more likely years of work, crafting and composing all the possibilities of the design you’d made, followed by months of bugtesting with your voluntary playtesters, finally releasing your work to the masses through the established distribution sites. At that point, the number of people playing it would likely number in the dozens, and your work would then join the pantheon of created IF works, and then, as far as a lot of the world was concerned, sink without a trace.

Now, this is a relatively glib way to put it all; in fact some games take off and are played far beyond the community of creators and players, some games are made in shorter times, some games are recognized as classics. One of the best aspects of text adventures is that playing one made in, say, 1998 holds none of the obvious earmarks of outdated software. You can boot up a game made 10 years ago and it will as fresh and enjoyable as one finished two weeks ago. But the problem of “how do we encourage more activity around the release of games” is one that’s been recognized and considered a long, long time.

In 1995, a solution was created, and it’s worked out pretty well: The IF Competition.

The IF competition basically sets up a framework where a bunch of games come out at once (giving players a bunch of games to choose from), around a deadline (helping to give people structure where there’s no financial incentive), and setting up judging rules (ensuring standards among the games in terms of play length). This last situation with length is rather clever: the idea is that you can get a very good idea about the game in just a few hours of playtime. This encourages the writers to focus on smaller, tighter games instead of expansive, never-to-be-completed games. While sometimes you get front-loaded creations (they look great up through to two hours and then aren’t as well done), what you often end up with are works that are understandable within an afternoon.

This may not sound like the games of old, but in fact a lot of people want to imagine they have the time to play massive games, but then they don’t. Nobody, on the other hand, can’t say they don’t have a few afternoons to tackle some good puzzles.

Yet another excellent metric are the winning entries themselves; I have friends who play these games who use the IFcomp archives to find the top-rated winners of various years. It’s a good way to know that you’re not going to follow the trials and tribulations of a given work until you suddenly stumble on a uncompleted hallway and a sign saying “BACK LATER”. Generally, the winners give a guideline of guaranteed quality.

So, we stand on the cusp of the 13th annual competition. On October 1st, the entries will be released into the wild, and you, yes you, can download the games, play them, and then rate them. Instructions on the IFcomp site give you all the guidelines for how this is done.

In other words, in just a few short days, you will be given not only a ton of crafted, honed games, but you will be asked to rate them, judge them, and reward those creators with prizes for their year of work. How could you resist?

See you there.

There’s nothing like a good lesson. Well, except an expensive lesson. Or a lesson that can still make you go “oh yeah, that lesson” a full five years later.

My lesson is Andgor.

Ah yes, I was just a mere sprite those many years ago when I read on Slashdot a story about a concept that grabbed me by the throat: personalized action figures. The concept, so simple, so cool: send in a photo and this company would create a personalized action figure, a doll with a hand-sculpted head placed on a generic body, with additional possible custom features attached. What an amazing idea.

So I went to their page, with its flashy graphics and clear statement, and containing a bit more expendable cash that perhaps I deserved, I paid for a figure ($400), and, in what is now a laughable irony, an additional $200 for a “rush fee”, so that the figure would be ready for the wedding it was to be a gift for. In my money went, and then I sat back and waited.

And waited.

Well, the couple who I got it for has had two children since then. One of the kids and I chat every once in a while. I started, filmed, and finished the BBS Documentary in that time. I’ve moved three times. And here I am almost done with GET LAMP and yes, there’s no chance of my figure ever showing up. It has been 6 years.

Oh, I made my calls, my pleadings, my annoyed letters. I called the better business bureau. I even filled out a form with the Orlando Attorney General’s office. That money, my friends, is gone. Gone, gone, gone.

Many people have written about being ripped off by Andgor. They are scam artists. Pages like this one abound, but there are many others marveling over the idea of getting a personalized action figure. They marvel over the idea; they do not marvel over what they actually got.

AndGor Toy
254 Ronald Reagan Blvd
Suite 223
Longwood, FL 32750
407-331-5890
All Emails:
sales2@andgor.com
customerservice@andgor.com
orders@andgor.com
info@andgor.com

So, the question is, why do I sit back and “take it”? Well, for one point, let’s be clear: the next time I’m in Longwood Florida, they are getting a brick through their front window. This is worth getting arrested for. I would love for them to try and get a judgment against me.

But until I get a chance to stop by and smash their window, I let this lesson, this painful lesson, bubble up to the surface of my thoughts every once in a while. Believe it or not, I’m a very trusting person. This little endeavor reminds me how there are people who, in the face of everything, will scam, scam and scam. They will hold their own and take advantage, and promise things they can’t deliver and steal from people. I’ve been a very lucky person, scammed very little in my life. Andgor stands as my biggest betrayal. It’s nothing compared to losing a home or a child, but it definitely sticks with me. And it reminds me how hard I should work, when doing business with people as a person who makes these films, to treat all people with respect and quick response. And to take the high road.

P.S. I am serious. I am going to break their window.

I’ve had an XBOX 360 for about 3-4 months now. Here’s some sketched thoughts on it.

• It is very pretty, and its games can, if they try, be very pretty.
• Sound-wise, it is like parking a Tie-Fighter in my living room.
• Like a lot of other people, mine was built poorly. It died, not with a specific error message or code, but by getting stuck in some sort of insane booting loop, showing between 1-4 sections of the boot-up logo and then resetting. It did this basically from the moment I bought it, but sometimes it would break out of it and I simply wouldn’t turn the machine off for a week or two. Eventually, it just never would break out of the loop, and I sent it off to be repaired, which took a little over a month. And resulted in a brand new console. That removed a lot of my purchased games. So yeah, of the last 3-4 months, over 30 percent of that has been spent not owning the console, and a portion of the latter 30 percent discovering I really don’t own the games.
• I played a lot of Test Drive Unlimited and enjoyed myself very, very much, especially the way the landscape never ended, there was almost no “pop-up” in the background and the lighting. I also enjoyed, after I’d gotten things together, tracking down other players and smashing into them for miles and miles and miles, later tracking them down again. This was probably not in the original design of the game.
• A lot of people, and by that, I mean, everybody but a handful, seems to think it best to announce they smoke marijuana. Usernames are variations of “420bunny”, “weedmaster”, “ganjaXXXXX54″ and so on.
• I played a lot of Texas Hold’Em before I switched to using a headphone set, and then the game’s entertainment increased a hundred-fold. It’s one thing to beat someone in a hand and another to hear a horrified scream come over the headset as I win on the “river”, coming from behind for a straight.
• That said, an awful lot of them take this time to discuss drugs, while playing the poker.
• My TV turned out to be less Hi-Def than I’d hoped.
• Sometime recently, I discovered the whole feature where you have multiple “channels” and you can be talking with someone over the headset while playing an entirely different game, then click back into the “game channel”, and so on. I thought that was very neat. Anything that causes more communication and less lonely game-hugging works for me.
• Drunk people are even less fun on a audio channel during a game than in real life.
• I was very impressed with Burnout Revenge. I realize I’m coming into this late, but I am really struck how cinema and videogames are now feeding off each other, with this game doing cinematic “crash time” that lets you fetishize your crash or crashing others before throwing you back into the mix. And the destruction game, in which you are essentially and totally a terrorist driving an exploding vehicle into crowded areas, is a tour-de-force of 3D and physics. I am so pleased to see this level of detail and achievement in a game.
• Obviously, with all my current projects I have no time to really, really enjoy these games, but I know I have something waiting for me on the other end.
• I’m glad I lived to see this level of quality, up from “Space Invaders” and “Donkey Kong”.

Back in 2005, I gave a talk at DEFCON called “Why Tech Documentaries are Impossible (and why we have to do them anyway)”, which was about the documentary format, the lessons learned from the production of “BBS: The Documentary”.

• This was held on Sunday, which is just about the worst time for my voice on a DEFCON weekend; you can hear how blown out my throat is, with a nice low growl the whole time.
• Similarly, I seem to be rather messed up on some level, because I keep touching my hair (I give myself a cowlick at 03:10).
• That said, I really do love the subject, and so it was an easy one to give.
• Some of this subject matter overlaps with the “Edge of Forever” talk I gave at DEFCON this year, specifically a joke about Angelina Jolie’s boob in Hackers. I need a new jokewriter.

I was happy with the speech, ultimately. A good solid overview of documentaries and the issues involved.

Here’s the video.

This entry was posted on September 27th.

My job was simple: replace a couple USB hard drives on a server. The hard drives were sitting on top of the server. The server was high up in a cabinet. The cabinet had ventilation, in the form of a fan on the top of the cabinet plugged into a power strip in the cabinet.

So one moment I’m moving these drives around and another moment my hand has slapped against the top of the server, knocking over a drive, and my hand is bleeding. Super bleeding, that special kind of bleeding where you think the wound is kind of kidding, or a misdirection, and then it proves that no, no it isn’t.

So what I’d done is lifted the drive up too much and my forefinger on my right hand went right into the fan.

I was quite lucky; it basically bounced off my fingernail, breaking it, and blowing my hand out of its way before cutting into something useful, like a joint.

The speed and fury at which my life could have changed is what strikes me. One instant, and I would have had an endless point of discussion and conversation at parties, as well as a slower (or different) typing speed, slightly floppy gloves, probably half a year of on-again off-again depression.

People make plans that encompass years and carve out priorities, and its this kind of stuff that reminds me that nothing is promised, nothing is assured. It’s humbling.

Also, it hurts.

(A cracked, cleaned-up-of-blood fingernail looks like this, by the way. The little part at the bottom there has fallen off but things are healing a-ok.)

This entry was logged on September 26th.

Many schoolteachers were poison to me, enough that at one point early in my academic career, a principal sat down with my parents and explained, in alll seriousness, that it would be best if I was transferred to another school, specifically a private one, to prevent my actions from damaging other students with promising futures.

I remember a fourth grade teacher explaining to her students in the middle of a science discussion, how it was a very bad idea for us to drink orange juice in the mornings, because the cold juice would cause damage to our intestines, and the shock of this cold beverage would make us unable to function properly at school. She said this easily, couched between lectures of how many planets there were and how molecules worked. During an event called “Hat day” where the young folks were encouraged to wear silly hats, I wore a boot, which caused some (appropriate) stir, and of course she confiscated the boot, and then launched into an explanation that hats, when worn inside, caused dangerous overheating to our heads and would make us not think.

Somewhere out of this muck and mire of folklore and despair I came into contact with one of my best teachers ever, Mr. Perks. Stephen Perks, that is, a marathon-running kickassery of a teacher who could make good time for twenty-five miles and yet still lose hours after classes to help kids, kids who needed help, like me.

I could take up way too much time singing Mr. Perks’ praises but I especially wish to give a specific example of where he ruled and, by combining forces, he was made to rule even more.

By luck of a draw that explains my never winning raffles since, Mr. Perks was transferred from 5th grade to 6th grade the same year I was; that means I got him twice. After an amazing year (where, among other things, he read us The Hobbit in class), he was one of my teachers yet again.

The 6th grade was the highest grade taught at Fishkill Elementary, and was in the old part of the school, which was what could only be described as a multi-story schoolhouse with bell tower on top. The rest of the modern, flat crap they built in the 50s was around the base of this little marvel, like sleeping dogs. When you went to the 6th grade, you literally walked up the stairs into another world. The ceilings were high, the doors massive, and just two classrooms were on each floor, with a staircase of enormous proportions. I could make a Harry Potter reference but it doesn’t quite fit, because the approach in this older location was modernity itself.

Mr. Perks came into his own, joining up with two other teachers who basically formed a triumvirate of educational power. One of these other two teachers was Mr. Foley. Mr. Foley was a rotund but not obese fellow with a beard and glasses, and a metric ass-ton of energy. He cared, and that was critical. I can imagine these three teachers sitting around a porch, sipping beers and trying to figure out how to make things even more kick-ass while staying within the guidelines.

The first thing they did was share classes, so that one teacher taught a subject that the others didn’t, and so on, and the students would have to walk between these classes during the day. This was not what a lot of sixth grade classes did; they did it, they told us, to train us for junior high school and up, when a bell schedule would be in effect. In other words, they looked ahead at what we were going to do and prepared us for that as well as their own requirements. This is how you end up with students who are in college and taking third-year courses while others are revealing that, in fact, they can’t conjugate verbs reliably.

Of all of the teachers, Mr. Foley was specifically worried about something that, in my later years, I realize is the root of my own interests: media and social criticism. No, I don’t mean we sat around and said the new movie was “good” or that we read a book and it was “good” or that crap. No, he took time to lecture us and specifically arm us against the absolute onslaught of misleading garbage that was going to come our way through television, newspapers and social interaction. In today’s world, 6th grade would be way too late, but at the time, it was just what the doctor ordered but the schools would never have prescribed.

He had a coffee maker way up on a shelf/closet in this room; a big old metal affair, probably good for a crowd of 30. At some point during the year, he pointed out this coffee maker and told the story of how he got it. The answer, you see, was a time share seminar, one of those terrifying high-pressure sales gigs where you’re promised a gift and a trip and whatever else, and they lay into you endlessly with how great a deal whatever they’re selling is. He wove a story, now lost in my memories, of how he and his wife sat through it, and what the person wanted, and how, after they resisted purchasing the product, they got treated meanly and grudingly. He wanted to open our eyes, and I know he did it for me, how not every transaction is out there to help you, that not every deal is a good one, and how exactly even your greatest resolve not to be taken could still be overcome. A great story.

Mr. Perks and Mr. Foley, along this line, cooked up this experiment. Looking back, it was a moment of sheer brilliance, one of those life lessons I got with my allowance instead of my mortgage.

They set up an auction between the classes. One would be buyers, one would be sellers. We were the buyers, and Mr. Perks’ were the sellers.

The sellers had to sell something, something inexpensive, that they owned. They would make a paragraph about their item (writing skills!) and then it would be put into a little newsletter (publishing!) and then that newsletter would go to my group, who would read it (reading skills!) and then we’d bid on them (mathematics! purchasing! games!) and then we’d get the items.

And, like the wave, it came out better as a lesson than I think anyone could imagine.

See, the secret was, the items absolutely sucked.They were broken, they were small, they were half of what was needed. They were sub-par items, you see. We were being, to some amount, had.

The language of the paragraphs, worked on with the kids by the teachers, were absolutely true. They were accurate and forthright, but they were hardly comprehensive, and they were in most cases misleading. You would read them and go “wow, what a cool toy” and then you’d get it and it just sucked.

I mentioned “the wave” because these items were meant to go at rates of, as I recall, a dime or a quarter, and some of the items were ultimately sold for a dollar or more, 10 times the original offered price. (I could be fudging that; it was, after all, nearly 30 years ago, but I recall debate among the teachers about the rising prices).

On the day of our getting the items, I remember opening my little box of whatever I’d bought, and hoo boy was it garbage. It was some flimsy piece of plastic that I, for all I could remember, should have been metal, 20 feet high and capable of lifting a truck. I remember toy cars missing wheels, and half a crayon box. The lies in the paragraphs were lies of omission.

What a lesson!

I don’t even know what passes for media criticism in many educational institutions; I remember running into college students in later years with what I considered a fantastic unicorn-filled outlook at the world, but I was, even by age twelve, wary, suspicious and careful about promises and deals. Granted, I still got conned into getting a credit card at 18, but I ascribe that to the underhanded techniques of Emerson College and their “partner” credit card firm than any wariness I had built in. One pitfall in my younger life, compared to the hundreds I negotiated around deftly thanks to the seeds planted by Mr. Foley and Mr. Perks. You guys ruled.

This entry logged on September 26th.

One of the greatest things to come out of my documentaries are friendships.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. Some I would see randomly, in the middle of events. (This was what I’d try to do to prevent easy biases, which sort of worked.) And others I would make arrangements with because they were experts in something, or conveniently located, or who had experienced something I thought would work out well in the quilt of interviews. I certainly wasn’t choosing buddies.

But you know, every few dozen interviews, I’d find someone I really admired or got along with or found that a couple hour interview turned into an afternoon of hanging out. And sometimes we’d even hang out on later days or see each other at cons. And if I was in town, I’d hang out again.

Like I said, never intended, but now I’ve gotten:

• Friends who I talk to nearly every week, or even daily;
• People who insist/expect a dinner when I’m in town and guarantee a great one when I go;
• Folks who I see a few times in year at events or hangouts who I’d have otherwise missed;
• People who think of me (and who I think of) when stuff goes by I’d like them to have.

In the speech I gave at Defcon I went off at the end about “Living a full life”, and was talking about breaking out of standardized patterns that can entrap and deaden your interactions with the world. The trick I used was to go out and meet many people on their own terms and in their own homes. It was great.

If nothing else comes of it, many of these friends are for life. That’s just indescribably wonderful.

And as the piles of BBS Documentary discs goes out the door (the pile is really getting low!) and after the pile is gone, I’ll still have these friends. Who could ask for more?

The Frontaclues are provided to assist you with further enjoyment of the It Is Pitch Dark video.

Have you found:

• The KOZMO.COM dropbox?
• The copy of the BBS Documentary?
• The 8″ Floppy version of Planetfall?
• The two Apple Lisas?
• The original artwork of Planetfall?
• The Wico Joystick?
• The cow-colored Macintosh SE?
• A copy of “Masterpieces of Infocom”?
• The Cat-o’ Cat-5 tails?

Have you tried:

• Reading all the rooms in the “map” sequence? (There’s over 30)
  
• Figuring out how many Infocom games get references? (At least 10)

• Discerning how the shot of Frontalot being reflected in the Apple II screen was done?
• Hiring me for your next music video?

A small note: As you might guess, Frontalot’s video as it will appear on the GET LAMP DVD set will have a number of extra features wrapped into it, including alternate angles and shots.

I get interesting packages in the mail.

These were all in separate auctions from one seller. I bought out most of his inventory. All are likely to go up on cd.textfiles.com. Some are probably pretty rare, others much less so. They range from shareware compilations to really crappy “game” compilations of demo/shareware versions of commercial games, to what appears to be a directory of CD-ROMs that were available in the mid-1990s, which will likely be a treasure of sorts.

Good thing I added 750gb of disk space to the textfiles.com machine last week, huh.