Everyone who wrote to me when I announced my finger nearly being severed will be happy to know that the finger has 100% healed and you couldn’t tell in a million years that the finger ever got stuck in a fan. The nail’s entirely back and the whole thing has grown back like nothing ever happened. Score one for luck.

Actually score a billion for luck, because I’ve had more ludicrous close shaves, more cases of waking up driving, more cases of stepping away from a thing that’s then imploded or gone killdozer than I really deserve, statistically. I acknowledge this and let you know that if I end up perishing in some absolutely ludicrous fashion, it will merely be the one fatal false step in what was a towering pile of non-fatal false steps. The house wins, but I broke even most of the time.

This isn’t some suicide note or anything, just mentioning my appreciation of my good luck. It’s good to be aware that you don’t necessarily “deserve” a break, especially when it comes at the end of spectacularly risky behavior.

And I can vouch that I am much slower and methodical about the process of loading USB drives into a cabinet with a fan in it.

I love Grr Guy. Grr Guy is awesome.

Grr Guy’s messages are (usually) short, snappy and to the point. If you could translate them from whatever language Grr Guy writes in to useable english, it’ll look like this:

TO: Jason Scott
FROM: Grr Guy

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Now, granted, Grr Guy can sometimes take many paragraphs to say this, or just a few lines, but this is the gist of it.

Grr guy has to be considered separate from Wronged Guy or Guy I Called a AssMunch, people who I am specifically targeting or bothering or otherwise in conflict with. No, Grr Guy actually has very little direct interaction with the subject at hand. It’s not about being mistreated by me; it’s about being incensed and not approving. Disapproval is Grr Guy’s fuel for his anger engine, which he is revving very menacingly at me.

BBS days had less Grr Guys simply because the barrier to entry was higher; you were calling a BBS and leaving messages and sending one directly to the person meant that you had to be, with few exceptions, a member of that BBS, had been doing stuff on it, was a part of it. Like I said, Grr Guy’s about disapproving something he has no direct pain from. That was pretty rare, back then.

But now, you can go to a website, read a paragraph, and bang out some half-assed Grrrr within seconds. You don’t have to know anything about the paragraph-writer, the site, or even the subject being discussed. Just drop a bomb and move onto the next waiting target. It’s very easy, very simple, and the resultant waves of response don’t really wash over you because Grr Guy is Gone.

When I get one of my little prominence bursts, Grr Guys come out from all sorts of places, and the next thing I know everything’s up for grabs. The result, often, is a decision to ignore all incoming Grrs until they’re gone.

This is sort of a mistake. Sort of.

Even though the signal to noise ratio is like running your ipod through a degaussing magnet, there are very occasional bursts of useful information in the pool of Grr. One of the things I love doing is browsing a slashdot story at “show me every last bit”, because sometimes down in the sewer of anonymous assery is a real insight that’s simply been pounded down into obscurity by overzealous on-topic cops.

Unfortunately, the method of deployment for a Grr and for a totally-nails-it, cut-out-the-bullshit assessment is the same. People make brilliant insights in short, snappy writings, often doing so with a dash of insult and a hint of dismissal. This is the same container as a Grr but the payload is precious. Devoid of context, missing the vital personality-cult veneer friends and fans make, someone is potentially going to give you some really good advice, although delivered with all the panache and love of a claw hammer. But that advice, it’s vital! Or it’s a Grr.

For all his annoyances, for all his propensity to be a time waster, I really do like Grr guy. I can hear him late at night, disapproving, dismissing, running away.

Grrrrrrrr.

FiOS was installed into my home today.

This augments my T-1 line, which is where a lot of my other servers not handled by outside hosting goes. When you go to cow.net, or this weblog, you’re yanking from the T-1. FiOS will up my current download speed from 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps, and upload speed from 1.5Mbps to 5Mps.

I am not 100% fantastically happy to be utilizing Verizon’s service, but they’re the dominant monopoly and I went for the one year signup. If they blow, they go. And believe me I’ll know.

I see gabillions of “I got FiOS Installed” weblog postings out there, including this excellent one from Dan Bricklin, so I won’t fill your screen or time with yet another one, even if I thought I could make it “funny”. My installer is on the ball, friendly, young and knows his crap. Hooray for that; it harkens me back to the early days of my phone life and meeting the Bell engineers who were on top of stuff.

So, if you find anything slow this evening, blame me as I begin downloading the Internet.

When I was a student at Emerson College, I worked at and studied near the campus FM radio station (WERS, 88.9). The radio station took up all of a floor in one of the multiple interconnected buildings. The combination of doing some stuff there and being in the building meant I went by their entrance, often.

At the end of each semester or so, WERS would throw out dozens of records. Most were freebies sent by record companies to get played at college radio stations. A few were sets dropped off by hopeful artists trying to get their name out. They were usually scribbled on, or marked up. They were also often notched, because then the record company could report them as “damaged/discarded”, and then not pay the artists for the distributed music.

ANYWAY.

I, being who I am, would scarf up way too many of these freebie discards, and one of the discards was a strange album called “Movieland”. The cover was almost pure white except for the name of the band (in Arial Bold or thereabouts) and three people, two guys and a girl, one guy in bright colors and the other in a prim suit. The back of the album was similarly strange, with a list of credits (as one would find in the inner sleeve of a CD) and another odd photo of the three people. It went on the stack with the rest.

So when I finally got it back to the dorm and played it, I was quite struck by it. It turned out to be a combination of pop-synth music, and sample collage! This, for someone who loved Art of Noise, was a big deal; another cool band with off-kilter sample stuff!

And off-kilter it was. While some of the music was not out of place on top-40 radio, other pieces were almost horrific, with cries for help and sobbing punctuated by upbeat crescendos of drumbeats and chords. It was fun, weird stuff and it stuck with me. I couldn’t even tell you one other album I got from the discard pile.

So, years later, it’s 1995 and I own cow.net, my beloved bovine-themed ISP, and on the site I can put anything I want.

So I put up a Movieland Fan Page.

Very basic stuff. I put up a scan of the album, a transcription of the credits, and whatever meager information I could dig up on the members. They didn’t have long pedigrees that I could find online at the time, and the names weren’t all that easy to find. Interestingly enough, some fonts are now huge because I made the site in a text editor on a Sun 3/280 in 1995, utilizing the Netscape browser circa 1995. Not quite as compatible, these days.

So then I left it. I had my little fan page up, I was happy. Occasionally, like, every few years, I’d get some drib of information and off it would go into the page, or I’d find a link somewhere, and add it. It was way in the background. I’m sure in the last 12 years it’s been up, I’ve spent a total of 5 hours on it.

So what’s interesting to me is how it functioned as a beacon, a catch-all.

As search engines got more and more of a grip on things, my page got bundled up into them. As Altavista flattened the world wide web, turning any insanely-addressed page into a findable piece of information, so too did this put me in front of the face of people who were actually looking for Movieland.

Bear in mind that in 12 years, only one person has ever contacted me about the page, purely as a fan. So there’s your one-to-one.

But in fact, I was contacted by one of the recording engineers, a person who knew one of the band members, and ultimately by a student of one of the members… who lived in Massachusetts! This was Richard Lewis, who was one of the songwriters and vocalists of Movieland.

So, I contacted him. And he wrote back!

It turned out that one of his students (he teaches at Salem State College) had told him about it some time ago, but his letter to me didn’t get to me for whatever reason. So he’d known about it too.

He answered some questions for me about the band and the outcome of it (short form, he did some work with the eventual co-member, who got them hooked into the “industry”, they did the album and later a few gigs and then RCA dropped them). And he also mentioned he had a new band, called Machine 475. (Warning: Plays Music)

Machine475, really, is basically Movieland 3.0. It utilizes better equipment, but his vocals are in there, along with a whole range of other cool influences and co-writers making it even more engaging and dynamic. And now they’re doing live gigs!

I went to one last night, limping with gout and woozy from the medicine I’ve been taking. I got some good shots, although I used entirely the wrong lens.

The full album is here.

The songs were great, live. It’s heavily pre-programmed but with a collection of ingredients mixed onstage between the members. Richard Lewis’ wife played the harp for three songs, and he played the Theremin besides a range of samples and keyboarding, as well as vocals.

In between sets, I introduced myself and he knew immediately who I was. And was delighted I’d shown.

I mention all this because of the serendipity of things, finding this album completely randomly, and then a few years later I meet one of the members. My web page, going from a side effort, gains notoriety and linkage into the world, introducing hundreds to this band (I’ve seen the hits go up and down over the years). It’s all very fun, very exciting.

And has a great beat.

So, here’s an example of how I archive without utilizing, you know, me.

4chan.org, which is a popular image posting board, has a sub-board in which people post flash animations. All the time. 24 hours a day. Many are funny and many are disgusting and some are sublime. They repeat often and occasionally good ones are turned into “shock” versions that go horribly wrong and basically every thing you can do under the sun ends up going by there.

I used to go out and hunt down flash animation collections because I found them fascinating (when done right) and because you’d grab a little file (if it was done right) and you’d see something amazing (if it was done right).

Well, anyway, the page that 4chan runs is here. I don’t suggest clicking on anything from work or home. I suggest having a teenage runaway click on it from a truck stop using a stolen computer while you’re safely thousands of miles away and ideally have never met the runaway. I understand these optimal circumstances cannot always be easily met.

So, I wrote a script that downloads all the flash animations uploaded. And deletes already-grabbed ones. And puts them where I can do sorting (headings include MUSIC VIDEOS, VIDEO LOOPS, ANIME LOOPS, EPICS and so on).

I’ve been doing this all year.

I now have 9,000 of them.

What do I do with them? Well, I have a directory with the best of what I’ve seen gone by, and that always represents amusement to me. I send along amusing ones to friends. I study techniques in the more epic ones. And so on, all the stuff one does with artwork they acquire.

Is there bad stuff in here? Oh, oh yes. This is a completely unrestricted board, and even more critically, they do delete stuff that’s way way way over the top, and my script downloads them before they’re deleted. As a result, I can assure you, there are real actual flash video files in which you see actual animals die. I do not recommend seeing them. I don’t even recommend seeing them for myself; I have these files in my collection mostly so my doubler can get rid of them immediately. They end up getting names like “happybirthday.swf” and “calculator.swf”, because, as you know, people are jerks.

That unpleasantness aside, I’ve really seen some amazing works. People work hard on good animations, and if you use Flash properly (just like PDF), you can make simple, well-working and smooth-flowing animated works that border on broadcast-quality art and animation. I hold out for those.

So yeah; if you were wondering if anyone was collecting 4chan (and other) flash animations, I’m your point man. 9,000 of them, totalling over 12gb.

And now you know.

A few people, when I recently talked about the new hard drives I bought, asked me about how I sort things, since they have absolute tons of random files as well. Totally understandable, and I’ll happily talk about it, but I have to warn you that I don’t do anything according to any known code or formatting. I do what works for me.

If nothing else, I have to stress the most important rule, which I picked up, from all places, AEleen Frisch’s book “Essential System Administration”. In her book, she tells an anecdote, which I will now tell to you.

“I learned about the importance of reversibility from a friend who worked in a museum putting together ancient pottery fragments. The museum followed this practice so that if better reconstructive techniques were developed in the future, they could undo the current work and use the better method. As far as possible, I’ve tried to do the same with computers, adding changes gradually and preserving a path by which to back out of them. “

A little white-hot cube of brilliance, that is. And that’s the #1 thing: any methods I provide or come up or which you do must be ones that, down the road, you can completely undo as better technology and techniques become available. Specific to the sorting of files, this means I don’t kill off compilations, delete metadata, undo ISOs, or otherwise split apart that which can’t be immediately unsplit. I also, whenever possible, try to keep things together that were always together. In all cases, it’s because as time goes on, things get better.

I have a FreeBSD file server using samba to allow my Windows box to interact with the hard drives. This is important because it lets me choose utilities that work in Windows as well as scripts and applications that work in FreeBSD/Linux. So I get whatever does the job best.

You can’t survive, once you go past a few tens of thousands of files, without some sort of doubles checker. I use a freeware program called CloneSpy as well as some Perl scripts that find duplicates. I actually have a version of the perl script that always deletes the newest files that are doubled; this lets me run it automatically as needed and kill off the redundant newcomers.

I am always erring on the side of “get it again” if I can’t recall if I downloaded anything. As a result of that, I have a lot of doubled data; I just found recently that I had over 40gb of redundant data collected on 15 hard drives across three machines. That’s a lot of downloading the same stuff. But better that than the sad keening I get from people who can’t believe that yyysite.com has gone under and nobody kept a copy. I keep a lot of copies.

So first, I split stuff into generic massive folders. In my case, it’s IMAGES, MOVIES, AUDIO, WEBSITES, APPLICATIONS, and DOCUMENTS. I acquire something, and throw it into one of these massive headers. That’s good enough sorting for my needs, on the spur of the moment. At least it’s generally there.

Underneath each one are arbitrary collections. So, for DOCUMENTS, I have sub-folders like MANUALS, MAGAZINES, BOOKS, and so on. Under MOVIES we have sub-headings like MUSIC VIDEOS, MUSICAL EVENTS, PRESENTATIONS, TECHNICAL DEMOS, CAMERA DEMOS. I built each one up when I had a collection of movies that would fill such a directory. As you can see, these are arbitrary. Is something a technical demo or a camera demo? Is it both? I choose one, randomly.

Under DOCUMENTS/BOOKS I will likely have thousands of documents representing books (and textfiles and PDFs and so on). So, if it starts getting big, I add subfolders under THAT like POSTERS, FICTION, TECHNICAL, SCIENCE, HAM RADIO, and so on. Each one gets a bunch of books.

Now, you would likely split things up differently, and we would probably disagree on what goes into TECHNICAL and what goes into SCIENCE. And indeed, sometimes I will yank something out of one folder and put it elsewhere.

But what I’m doing in all this is reducing the size of any given directory. Instead of having to stare, dumbly, at a multi-thousand-file data dump that I can barely get though the “A”s without glazing over, I have a few trees I can browse in.

We get into an advantage of my personality, which is that I have an unnatural attraction to classification and sorting. I will sit for hours and hours and hours, taking a big pile and adjusting it into dozens of smaller piles, arranged along a hierarchy. I do this all the time, both on my computer and in my office and in a bunch of other locations. (I straighten places I visit, for example.) So for me, this whole approach works because I have so much fun sorting it.

Now, and this is important (and I’ve mentioned this before), what is going on with this data is that it is all STATIC. That is, as opposed to dynamic. This stuff has a specific aspect about it, that is, once I grab “it”, “it” is basically done as far as my interaction with it. I might read it or look at it, but “it” stays the same. This works for movies, documents of a collected nature, music, and so on. I have it and that’s that. So this data is all kept in one place.

In other folders, I have more dynamic stuff, like e-mail I’ve sent, documentary in-process stuff, raw footage, work documents, and so on. This stuff is still being worked with, still being engaged. So it doesn’t make ANY sense to put it on this static location. I might, if it strikes me, put a backup folder on the same drive as the static folder, but that’s simply for redundancy, not because it should be there. I’m basically piggybacking on the infrastructure already there, like leaving my valuables at work because work is unusually protected or secure.

That said, once my dynamic stuff becomes static (new job, documentary is complete), then it becomes static and is shoved on the drive as needed.

So this, in a very simple nutshell, is how I approach my data. I do not pretend it would work for everyone, and I’m not overly interested in hearing about improvements to my system. It morphs, adds and deletes ideas. But for now, that’s how the terabyte storage is split up. And I tell you, I can get an idea in my head (where’s that podcast I wanted? Where’s that old website with the cool pictures I saved?) and I can get to it within a very short time, sometimes a few seconds. That’s good enough for me.

Another day, another gout attack. These things are fantastic.

Gout manifests itself in many ways, in hugely variant amounts of pain or discomfort. For me, I have a range of situations I go through with my gout that makes it especially interesting. Specifically, my left elbow swells up, which lets me know the fun’s coming. Then, my left knee starts to swell. Initially, it’s not a big deal, and I limp a little, but then it swells to the point that you can no longer see any kneecap, and then I basically can’t move.

So, I end up propped in front of a computer or on a couch, kind of lumped there, with enough pain that I can’t quite concentrate on things. That’s been the last couple of days.

This, as I mentioned previously, motivates me to want to really get stuff done when I return to normal. And return I will. Just not today.

Fred Fish died in April of this year, many months ago. Research into my previous weblog entry on raytracing caused me to discover this.

When someone like Fred Fish dies, there isn’t that sort of reverberating echo throughout the world that a standard-issue celebrity might achieve. This is the price paid for doing something good but not then following it up with a series of infamous-enough actions or projects that your name lives in infamy and your death even more so.

No, Fred Fish merely did some really great stuff for the Amiga and then went on to do some great (but not leader-oriented) stuff in computer programming and then he died, at age 54.

Fred was an archiver and organizer, like myself. In his case, it was Amiga shareware. As shareware became available, Fred would assemble them onto floppies, archived and described, and then make them available. They were called the “Fred Fish Disks”, or sometimes the “Fish Disks”. Just looking for his name will get you lists like this one. Basically, if you were looking for stuff for your Amiga, it passed through Fred’s hands. Fred worked for years on this, creating over a thousand of these floppies from the usual BBS morass of files, making it that much easier to find stuff.

There’s an impulse I have these days to go and interview someone, and their death and my not meeting them means that interview would not happen, but I don’t think that would have been overly relevant here. Fred was a collector, and he shared his collecting with others, and the world was better for it. I know I benefited from his years of effort and I know many, many others did too.

Thanks, Fred.

A long time ago, I was a render junkie. I got better.

Like a lot of people, my real introduction to Raytracing as a concept came in the form of the Amiga Juggler, a had-to-be-impossible animation created by Eric Graham that was doing some sort of amazing trickery with graphics and reflections that were well beyond anything I’d seen before. Well, more accurately, I had seen stuff like this before, but it was off in the realm of however-they-do-movies, stuff like the Tron films and Juggler Adam Powers. This was stuff that people could be using most anything to accomplish, but the Juggler that I saw was being done on my Amiga, and I simply could not fathom that.

As an example of the disposability of graphics, you might look at this animation with a weary eye and conclude it is simplistic, easy-to-pull off and no great shakes. But at the time, I do assure you, it was a miracle. Specifically, the reflections of the glass balls are a miracle, while the rest of it is merely astounding beyond normal measure. Raytracing, you see, was one of those innovations that far outstripped my own abilities and understanding, yet its output was obvious and fascinating. You could tell me that you’d mathematically constructed a model for simulating rays of light as they would appear to bounce around a scene and therefore could create highly realistic and accurate images, but I wouldn’t really understand how you would do that. I suspect I still don’t. Others, naturally, have an innate ability to understand all this; one of my heroes Drew Olbrich not only wrote ray-tracers for fun and learning but even did one with a calculator and markers, which is up there with the kind of magic that sends you immediately to hell.

If my salad bar of superlatives seems over the top, this is really how raytracers and the concept of them excite me.

Somewhere after the explosion of the Amiga Juggler, came DKBtrace, a command-line raytracer for the Amiga written by David K. Buck and which dropped, into my waiting hands, the ability to actually do raytracing. Bear in mind, of course, that raytracing under these circumstances might seem a bit strange. Without a graphics interface, all scenes and lights and everything else were pure textfiles. Here’s how you’d make a red sphere:

OBJECT
SPHERE <0 0 3> 1 END_SPHERE
TEXTURE
COLOUR Red
END_TEXTURE
END_OBJECT

I assure you, a person who is motivated enough can put up with and learn anything. Being given the tools with which to accomplish something wanted beyond all measure, no matter how strange the tools, is a minor hurdle. I learned the arcane DKBtrace language and how to do light sources (you created a sphere and colored it what was needed and then declared it a light source) and all the rest of it, and I could raytrace before I turned 20.

That said, bear in mind that rendering a 320×200 image on an Amiga 1000 was an overnight, 8 hours+ commitment. The system was doing a lot of calculation to generate these images, and it taxed the system completely. And sometimes it would crash. Still, of course, I immediately shot for the moon and wanted to do a movie on it.

My movie, which I haven’t given much thought to in the last 15 years, involved having shopping carts recreating a dance scene from West Side Story. I don’t even know how I expected to accomplish this, but I figured, probably reasonably so, that by the time I got one aspect of the approach down (making the shapes, doing the test renders), technology would slowly increase to the point that I would either be able to get what I wanted or know somebody who did.

I did some basic work with florescent lights (huge rectangles, add width, color white, add second rectangle, color gray) and with making shelves of products, and so on. Bear in mind, we’re talking weeks, with the computer left to “render” out my test models and other items while I walked around the streets of Boston in the 1990-1991 period. A very strange time.

However, more critically, as I got into the Internet (pre-web version) and was finding myself on UNIX boxes, I made the delightful discovery that DKBtrace had been ported to UNIX! Not only that, I loaded up some of my data files, and they worked, and not only did they work, but they worked fast. A UNIX box could render these images in less than an hour, and do it in the background (as this was my inspiration to learn about the “&” backgrounding command in UNIX), and have it waiting for me the next time I logged in.

So there is this period of time in my life, going from around 1990 to 1993, when I am a complete and utter rendering junkie. What I mean by that is that I would beg, borrow and steal my way onto any machine I could find, anything with a unix account and an ability to compile, and I would upload DKBtrace (and its later incarnation, POVray), compile it, and then start sucking up the CPU cycles. And again, this is not minor computation I was doing, especially as I jammed things up to 640×480 images. We’re talking one of the most active processes on a machine, easily noticeable, a hostage situation for the processor, making my images.

I’d start out rendering one of the default images, just to get a handle on how powerful the processor was. One of my favorites was this pac-man image done by Ville Saari, because you got this wonderful reflection-filled creation and based on how many minutes it took to render, you knew exactly how good a machine you’d snagged.

I have this great memory of visiting Clarkson University related to my online game for a party, and hanging with a guy, and then finding out he had access to a bunch of UNIX machines. “Oh, REALLY,” I said, like an drunk finding out your dad had a liquor cabinet downstairs. Next thing I knew, I was on a bunch of boxes, just rendering like a maniac, drinking in the fast CPUs, pulling in the reflections, making those machines my little slaves.

Like I said, I got better.

I’m not quite sure why I stopped, but I did. I still visit the POVray Hall of Fame, and love going to Pixar movies and still go out of my way to see the computer-generated films even if a lot of them suck. The love is there. But I guess it’s similar to why I don’t work on videogames anymore; too many people with too much more time than me doing way too much cooler stuff. “Core Competency”, that easily-thrown-out term by a million middle managers, applies here. It’s not where I’m really good at things and so many people are kicking ass. So I don’t.

In the middle of my work at Focus Studios, the game startup I spent my 26th year at, there was a need to create a mock-up computer animation of a game being worked on. Two months went into that, utilizing 3D Studio max and textures in Photoshop and so on. I thought it was very good, what came out the other end, but I don’t have much record of it. What I was struck by, at the time, was how much easier things were. Graphical Interface, render times, choice of textures, reflectivity… it was all slick and easy compared to my earlier days, strung out on CPU cycles and traced rays. I think that was the last time I really did much in the way of 3D graphics work that was anything like my misspent early 20s. I do miss that, the waiting for the picture to render, the anticipation that I got things right, and the dim glow of reflected metal in what I ultimately produced.

I miss it very much. Like any recovered junkie.

I didn’t record a frame of film. It was a roaring success.

I mention this because the whole reason I work the way I do on my films is to specifically avoid the kind of disposable relationships and interaction with others that plague a lot of professional productions. I maintain the goal of having nobody regret having been interviewed or dealing with me, during my documentaries. Of course, this is never 100% the case but the resultant percentage where people are unhappy are usually because of one of two reasons:

• They thought I was making a different documentary than I was.
• They agreed to be interviewed without really understanding what that meant.

So one of the ways I avoid these problems is to give folks warning about my coming in with camera and questions, and talking to them, if not extensively, at least once or twice beforehand. My experience and rule of thumb, for example, is that if you interview someone within a week of them hearing of your film, it’s probably going to go pretty badly. Probably the biggest misunderstanding is thinking I can do the filming in a local restaurant… followed by not understanding the the interview is on camera. It just leads to heartache.

So I spent all of today driving 230 miles, to meet twenty people and record none of them. Of course, my camera, lights and other stuff was in my car, and I’d flown it all from Boston to be at the ready, but it was never brought out, never used.

Instead, I talked. I talked about my production, about the community I was hanging with. I was talked to about interesting events, books to read and research and about various details. I’ll be heading to the location again, a month later, a little more money spent.

But instead of focusing on the cost, it’s about doing things right. I lose some opportunities here and gain others. I do know, however, that nobody was used and the resulting footage will be real and honest.

I mention all this because people sometimes might see the result of my work and wonder both how I get people to talk like they do, and what my methods are. They might surmise I spring surprises on people or mislead them. I do not.

So lacking not a shot at all, my documentary will still benefit. Sometimes that’s how it benefits the most.