Well, first of all, there’s a ton of footage.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I mean this collection, where I’ve been uploading raw footage to archive.org on and off for the last two years. Mostly off. However, it’s already at 20 hours of footage, which has to count for something, right?

I love the reviews that the uploaded footage gets, too. Complaints that it’s not edited well (it’s unedited). Critiques of my interview style. Critiques of what I say during questions. Accolades too. Mostly critiques, though. It looks like we’re getting about 100 downloads a week of the raw footage, which is pretty cool. In the case of John Sheetz, who died before the production was finished, his interview has been watched roughly 16,000 times. Not bad at all.

What takes so long is this. I have to basically dedicate a machine to the process, a process where the tape I recorded it on is digitized to a 12gb file, that 12gb file is put into an editor, and I listen to the tape to make sure nothing too unpleasant gets on there (unpleasant meaning “legally actionable” or “the interviewee asked that it be struck during the interview”). Then I have to render it to a MPEG2 file, then upload that 2-3gb MPEG2 stream up to archive.org, which then derives 5-6 variations from that main stream. I have to do this for every hour, and there’s 200 hours. This prevents me from doing other stuff at the same time, and I have a lot of stuff I need to be doing.

So, I’m going to make a little dedicated digitizing machine for a while. I have a laptop that was recently made redundant, and it has vegas and capture software on it; I’ll put a fat USB drive on it, grab the goods, and start my rendering. That will fix some amount of the issue in terms of machine dedication.

Every once in a while I consider an intern, but an intern often comes with a college, and a college often comes with a request for credit. No thanks. I contacted the person, arranged an interview, flew or drove there, interviewed them, and did the camera and sound and questions. I’ll do the last bit myself as well.

Outside of the criticals who don’t get it, people seem to appreciate and enjoy them. I was given a few BBS video artifacts and I’m uploading them as I go. A TBBS training tape is up already and is a personal favorite, and I have others as well. (I used part of the tape for the beginning of one of the episodes, but you can now see the full wonder.)

I’m sure there’ll eventually be something I upload that causes some trouble, for some reason I can’t fathom, but for now I’m enjoying flying blind and taking reasonable steps. There’s a lot, and I mean a lot of BBS material covered here, some redundant and a lot unique. I think that when this is done, an awful lot of the history of the BBS will be there for people to enjoy.

I was sent mail informing me that Ryugen Fisher had had a heart attack and died suddenly. It had actually been a year since it had happened, in Chicago, while he was on a retreat.

Naturally, when someone dies, I don’t expect that any documentary filmmakers who interviewed them would be notified. We didn’t run in the same circles, so I wouldn’t have gotten news that way. I am grateful I was eventually sent some mail about it, of course.

Ryugen was one of my best interviews; he’s the middle guy in the Fidonet Living Room interview I conducted in St. Louis in the room where Fidonet’s biggest revision was hatched. I used footage from this interview extensively in the Fidonet Episode of the documentary.

I was told he was very excited by the filming coming up and talked about it for some time afterwards. During the interview, the other two gentlemen (Ken Kaplan and Ben Baker) also talked about how much Ryugen had influence on the steadying of emotions and the halting of battles internally in Fidonet.

Ryugen called himself “That Old Frog”; he did this in a lot of documentation and in a lot of messages, so finding him within the history of Fidonet probably requires that bit of information. He was a tattooed biker, a technical junkie, a consulting programmer, and a Buddhist Sensei.

Here’s a photo of Ryugen in 2005 from a party he attended.
Here’s a touching tribute written about Ryugen from one of his friends, with an excellent photo.

Of course, I have two hours of Ryugen speaking about Fidonet, politics and ARC-ZIP. I’ve moved them up on my (very slow moving) BBS Documentary Interview Collection queue, and the two hours in which he attended the interview are here:

Baker, Kaplan, Fisher Interview, Hour 2
Baker, Kaplan, Fisher Interview, Hour 3

We go all over the place in these two hours, but I think it’s quite informative, much more information than was in the Fidonet episode.

While contacting some of the interviewees about this, I found out another had been battling cancer for a year, and is back to health.

I don’t think this is going to get easier.

My XBOX gamer tag is “Sketch the Cow” and this causes some confusion. My IRC handle is “SketchCow” and it’s being used to say the same thing and to get around length restrictions. But it’s meant to be “Sketch the Cow” as well. Very occasionally, people wonder what the hell is going on, so here’s a very quick, very short primer.

In 1986, deciding to start a band with my friend Jeremy Stone, we spent a lot of time on what most reasonable high school bands would find important: the band name. We had a working title of “J.S. Squared”, since that was both our initials. This was fine and good. We started making music, and things went along.

At some point we knew we wanted to start building an elaborate, overly complicated backstory and statement associated with the band. This resulted in us working on “job titles” in the band. We were coming up with all sorts of crazy titles; one of them was “Rodent Motivation Supervisor”, as I recall. Somewhere down the line, one of us devised the title of “Bovine Ignition Supervisor”.

We looked at each other, and said “This is too good not to name the band this way.”

So the band became Bovine Ignition Systems.

This led to several things. First of all, our songs started taking on more and more of a “cow” theme. Heck, cows were inherently funny and so there you go. But more critically, people were starting to kind of associate us with cows. We were sent cow gifts, or referenced cow things, and it got kind of crazy there.

Ultimately, though, we found an ad for a cow suit. I ordered one immediately, for the time that we would perform live.

The suit was cool, and so I wore it here and there, and on our big live gig, I definitely wore it onstage, to great acclaim.

As I went to college and Jeremy as well (different colleges), we each had, in our possession, both our songs written by Bovine Ignition Systems (We’d do a few more after high school) and a ton of cow-related items. And by this time our families were well aware we had a “cow thing” going.

There’s “the cow”. Now, to switch gears…

In college, like at high school, I liked drawing. I liked drawing a lot. So in a lot of cases, you would find me drawing cartoons and art throughout classes, in hallways, and specifically in the common room area in my dorm. There was a fellow, his name long lost to time, who would come in to find me sitting around with my pad, and say “Hey, Sketch”. He did this for a full semester we were both in the same dorm. I thought this nickname was great; it said what I did, and it was one syllable. I thought it was pretty cool but didn’t force it on others.

When I got into the MUD world, co-founding a game called TinyTIM, I named my account “Sketch”. My description said I was a guy with one eyebrow and a big pencil. It was this way for about a year on the game.

For halloween, it became a suggestion and then a fad to re-describe your character on your MUD into a costume. So, naturally, I “dressed up” as a cow for this online costume ball.

Problem was, I forgot to change it back.

Months went by, and I was still a cow. Sketch the Cow. People assumed this was on purpose, and it became how I was known. A little cow, with drawing supplies. I liked it, and to be honest, people found an administrative type who was a cute little cow to be at least a slightly less problematic hurdle to approaching me. The fact I had a fantastically bad temper and a vice-like grip over the environment was still a bummer for some folks. But again, at least I was a cow.

I was a cow on this MUD for a decade, before retiring in a shitstorm of classy controversy. By that time, it was cemented. I was Sketch the Cow, and that was that. References abound to me in this fashion. Remember, it wasn’t until 1998 that I started this whole “archive” deal, and 2001 before I did documentary stuff. So there were many years of me, cow-hood and the rest before I ever got onto my current gigs.

This is also the reason, by the way, that I own cow.net. A good opportunity, a fun idea, and moooooooo.

And now you know. Handles are weird things. They come from strange places, and go places even stranger still.

One other bit: when it came time to make a company to do my documentaries, I decided that my old band name was too cool not to bring out again, and this is why the production company is called Bovine Ignition Systems. The name has confused the living hell out of nice folks signing releases or doing business deals (and in fact the abridged name BOVINEIS is on the inside rim of the BBS Documentary DVDs), but that’s where it came from, a special time earlier in my life that has stuck with me ever hence.

I don’t just get into something; I tend to live it, breathe it and eat it, for weeks on end, then move away to something else with that passion. These days, there’s been a lot of Halo 3 multiplayer happening.

It sounds almost sad to one segment of my audience; hours spent with a game? But in this case, there’s a lot to it I’ve been enjoying and a lot I’m observing now about the current state of communication and technology. It works for me.

I have been told of other, superior programs and of course many more will come along, but there’s a slight bias on my part that I won’t play (or don’t enjoy playing) realistic portrayals of wars the world has actually lived through. When the armor is real and the other team’s language is a real one currently in use and the locations are based on actual places where some very good people died, often for no reason, it’s just not my thing. So no Call of Duty 4 or America’s Army for me, thanks.

In Halo 3, it’s essentially insane paintball, with returns to service and a crazy tracking system. For example, you can see my entire history of playing this game online, updated within 2-3 minutes of each time I finish a game. And the amount of information up there is gigantic: which weapons I prefer, how I tend to do in different locations, how I tend to be killed or kill. And honestly, my entire game history! It’s astounding they’re keeping this on every player, in toto, and all the interrelationships from it.

(That also shows you my Xbox “Gamer Tag”, Sketch the Cow. There’s a story behind that name, which I’ll probably dump out in my next enty.)

The game itself attracts me because depending on the players involved, it can be a complicated tactical experience or a complete and utter rout. And to be honest, it’s the addition of the voice aspect that makes it particularly compelling to me.

The game uses voice communication extensively; everyone can chat before the game, and during the game a team can send messages among themselves, devising on-the-spot strategy. Congratulations can occur during or after the game, and in a few cases you can even learn a little more about the other players than you might expect, like where they’re from or why they’re awake at a given hour.

Or, and this is much more likely, more likely than Bungie (the creators) or Microsoft (the console makers) would want to admit… it goes into a massive, decimating clusterfuck.

The game is rated M for Mature, which means it’s supposed to be for people 17 or older. This is a lie and garbage in actuality; cascades, no, torrents of children are on this game, children who are obviously unable to drive a car, venture more than a mile or two from home, or possibly across the street. They are young, they are very high-pitched, and they are more than willing to explain to me, in stumbling-syllable fashion more suitable for a swing set, how they are going to kick my ass.

The majority, of course, seem to be in the 18-22 year old range, young men primarily, full of energy and life and also prone to the wild mood swings of the unnecessarily prodded slacker variety. I’ve had the pleasure of listening to them actually compare and contrast availability of drugs in the southeast versus central United States, obliterating whatever small amount of tactical response they might have otherwise been incapable of. Naturally, this is a contrast of priorities between them and me, and I am at peace with that. I do not need to know which bag of what costs what.

I am also struck anew, in nearly every evening of playing, how completely randomly various epithets are thrown out into the air in response to perceived wrongs. Just as the world of networked computers have enabled us to know rather comprehensively what hardware is popular and what configurations are most likely to be used, so too will a person playing Halo 3 discover the veritable rainbow of definitions for the word fag. I’ve heard it used as a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Subsequent to the noun usage, I’ve heard it to mean (I believe), “poor player”, “player using a powerful weapon over and over”, “excellent player”, “player who just said something you don’t agree with, and, ultimately, “player”.

I keep thinking that I will eventually grow inured to this, this consistent mutation of homophobic language used as a direct swap-in for the term huckleberry, but I just don’t. I’ve tried to stand up against this perceived problem, ideally to change some minds, but to call it ineffectual is an insult to things that are ineffectual. This is in fact an impossible-to-repair situation. I think it’s endemic to the entire process of growing up in society now; to the vast majority, you insult someone by implying they are homosexual, or that they are showing, in some way, the obvious inferior traits of homosexuals. It is so rampant it may have actually lost its original meaning. Or maybe not. Either way, I could see why a truly queer person would be inclined to stick a pen knife into his own neck. The fear and shame must be smothering. So thanks, Halo 3 by Bungie Studios, I appreciate this life lesson you’ve given me.

Another excellent situation is when I reveal, in the process of normal conversation during a game, that I am 37. You would think this would be minor trivia, but on several occasions I have been greeted with a barrage of profanity from another team player or random conversationalist indicating how horrible it is that I am playing Halo. This may sound off the wall, but I am talking about actual umbrage and outrage that someone so old would be playing. This is then followed up with speculative language about my life, my priorities, my time management, and my quality of existence. That I am playing such a game in a house I bought with a car parked outside that I bought on a massive TV I bought and none of these involve the direct involvement of my parents is apparently a crime. Who knew! Thank you again, Bungie Studios and Microsoft.

But I am downplaying, of course, the heights of this experience.

I am sometimes thrown among people having a genuine good time. Sure, one might apparently use random racial epithets as frequently as you or I might use the word “that”, and another might be, in actual life, a dope. But their words are warm, encouraging phrases and right-on shouts of happiness as the team accomplishes something. Recently, it was somewhat relevant to my “rank” in the game that I achieve a win, taking my number from 299 to 300. I mentioned this, and throughout the game, a person I didn’t know, who I’d never met before, would be shouting for everyone to go the extra mile, to “get Sketch his 300″. This is a very special thing, to hear this fellow wanting me to achieve something in the game, something he wouldn’t in a million years benefit from, but who was doing it so my enjoyment was that much more. That’s very special. And those special things happen all the time, patchworked within the bad.

My heart will sink, my evening tarnished, to have a directed, unstopping personal attack waged upon me by a random knob. But my heart will lift to find myself among a randomly assembled gang of players chanting “nerves of steel” or “good job” upon one of us accomplishing a particularly skillful move. It is a base feeling, an instinctual one; getting along, feeling bonded, moving forward. That this comes out of a game is an amazing thing. That I will likely never meet a single one of them, could never hope to, is the dark cloud that runs through the bright day, like the knowledge of remembering the dug hole waiting for you at your ultimate end. But in the moment, the moment these games have been designed to keep going as long as you possibly can, it is sublime.

We have come a long way from “Zaxxon”.

Some of you know what this is. Some have an inkling. Others are likely utterly confused.

Well, the guy on the right is me. I’m in a helmet, kneepads, and am using a tiny HD camera called the Canon HV20. On the left is Bruce, one of the four people who accompanied/protected me.

And we are in Bedquilt Cave, which is the actual cave that Adventure, the game, is based upon.

To be specific, we’re in the Debris Room, the description of which is “You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says “Magic word XYZZY”. A three foot black rod with a rusty star on an end lies nearby.”

To end up in this cave, filming locations for www.getlamp.com, required about a year of e-mails, arrangements, forms, and multiple trips. It was a long road and it was utterly worth it. The final production will credit all involved appropriately, but I do want anyone who has gotten here via a link to know of the efforts of Dave West, Peter Bosted, Bob Lodge, Pat Kambesis, Dennis Jerz, Rick Olson, Vickie Carson, the Cave Research Foundation, and Phil DiBlasi.

I learned so much and have had such an experience there, a true life-changing experience, that I’m working on a full travelogue and photo album separate from the work being done for the documentary, and I will link to that soon.

I call this the Cave of Dreams because I had a dream of doing this when the movie production began, or really, years before that, and to have one’s dreams fulfilled so completely is rare. I recognize this, and will carry it to the end of my days.

This entry says November 23, but in fact it is December 9th. I am writing entries as fast as I can, pulling in stuff I was thinking about from the time that the “official” date says, but writing it with the advantage/disadvantage of two weeks of passed time.

That this situation occurred is a result of a silly promise/intent I made to myself and my wanting to fulfill said promise beyond a reasonable measure. As part of becoming more prominent a public figure, I figured a frequent, well-written, content-heavy-and-punditry-light weblog would be a good item to have around. It certainly would, among other things, give me the skillset of writing a lot and writing it quickly, and the advantages therein. It would also give me a body of work.

At first, it was going to be seven days a week. A little while in I determined this was insane and knocked it to weekdays. I also took the position (and still do) that one day is one day; if I had another thing to write, I’d do it the next day. This way, people wouldn’t be crap-flooded like I see other weblogs do, where each day is this running torrent of stuff to wade through, and a lot of “oh, wait, one more thing” happens. So I had to compromise the initial promise, but it was structural.

But I’ve discovered another thing, which Flack and I discussed on the telephone following his lapband surgery – maintaining a weblog is not the same as “doing” stuff. If I put more and more weight into my weblog writings, I will inevitably have to pull that time and energy from somewhere else. Conversely, if I am working on ANY of my projects, be they outside or on the computer, there’s just no time for me to effectively write in the manner to which I am accustomed, that is, with actual content.

I could easily pull this off if I did indeed sink into that approach that I see many take: include a link, ass-yammer for a paragraph, talk about yourself for half a paragraph, and push that puppy into the world. I hate that and think it does little for the writer or the reader. It’s when I see someone take something they bumped into, be it online or off, and then use that little grain of intellectual sand as the base for something grand and greater that I think this whole medium of communication really takes off. I enjoy reading that and I hope they enjoy writing it. So, my insistence that my readers are fed by the entries alone and the outside links are dessert means this is a pretty intensive situation.

So my intention, currently, is to continue this catch-up, and post all the way to December 31st with a wrap-up, a review of my year, and then I will kick things back to a more appropriate situation: updates and postings as I am capable of doing them. This means weekend postings will likely return but that a day or a week might go by with nothing from me. If I’m skipping, it more than likely means I’m up to something. Just recently I redid artifacts.textfiles.com over, scriptwise, in preparation for making it better than it current is. That was a 4 hour project. That time has to go that way and that’s less time to write about, say, shadow narratives or the stunning quality of my butt.

Anyway, back into the time machine.

I’m sure there’s a name for this but I never heard it in film school and I suspect it’s a writer’s term that’s used instead.

My experience has been that there is a secondary narrative in presented works, whether they be films, books, or even music. This second, shadow narrative, is being told by the nature of the media and most importantly the structure of similar works at the same time as the work’s creation. It is in some cases capable of overwhelming the primary narrative, losing it completely, but other times it exists merely as a hum of distraction or an opportunity to surprise/entertain certain members of the audience in a new way.

Very haughty, I know. But I’ve thought about it for years and so it’s taken on this sort of elaborate construction, no matter how I try and simplify it.

Let me give some examples.

• When you watch a movie, the people who you know are famous will be treated special in the world the film takes place in, regardless of where it is. They will survive where others don’t, or if they are killed/removed from the narrative they are going to be complete in their lives/place in the film. Things or people they interact with are likely to be important or function with ease for their needs. If they don’t, then nothing is functioning at all and so they will consistently not-function just like everything else. In doing so, they will be helpful to the person’s goal to fail. The shadow narrative is once there was a person whose existence had a vital point worth observing.

• A story in which there is a mystery will have that mystery solved. When you hear people speak, they are discussing actions or ideas that in some way will resolve and answer a hanging question in the air, one either mentioned or not mentioned. The shadow narrative is here was once a world where a story had to be told, and that you will soon hear.
• A song in where there are lyrics about people will eventually clarify what those people are and why you are listening to a song about them. The lyrics may repeat and diverge from where you expected them to go, but they will eventually relate what happened. The shadow narrative is there are people you should know about and you are going to hear about them.

This contention of mine, which is a little difficult to defend and I even lose the thread of it myself occasionally, is something that is probably the hardest single context to maintain for historical purposes. This is why I bring it up; I think that it’s important for someone working with historical items to know these shadow narratives and provide them with the material.

This is all separate from “backstory”, like where you find out that a newsletter someone made was done at the expense of their marriage, or that a computer was designed due to the release of a competitor’s amazing computer at a recent trade show. In those cases, the work’s motivations or lack/height of quality has some explanation outside of the work. That information is generally harder to find but is still pretty findable. During the creation of my documentaries I often find these backstories, some of them vital to know, others unprintable or racked with human emotional pain. But that’s a separate situation.

The shadow narrative is almost always a function of culture. An example of the imposition of a shadow culture is the Hays Code of movies, established by the film industry to prevent legislative control of the outcome/production of films. By having a set of rules of what could be acceptable in a film, film companies were more than happy to comply with them. Guidelines, no matter how arbitrary or unfair, are still preferable to the terrifying black hole of uncertainty, after all. As a result of this Hays code, films made during its imposition ensured that you would never see certain sexual or “immoral” acts portrayed on film. In other words, there was a parallel understanding while watching a set of actions, that which certain things could never happen. A character not only was unlikely to take drugs to stay awake, he couldn’t. It would be as unexpected as having a pet dog and it spontaneously growing wings; you would never arrange things in your home concerned about your flying dog getting stuck in the rafters.

This shadow narrative would lie dormant except for the situation that people occasionally break it. And in some cases, break it on purpose. Agatha Christie comes to mind as an author who broke shadow narratives consistently; in one of her books, the narrator did it. In another, everybody did it. In many others, the most dead character was the murderer. As a reader, you would have an expectation of surprise in being given a set of people and deducing the culprit, and you read a mystery novel like Christie’s with that expectation. Christie knew this and would craft her books in such a way that even though there was a plot and a set of actions and dialogue occuring, those were one set of “world” and the endless pairs of eyes watching this set of events, waiting for the inevitable conclusion. Characters would make references that were of little use to the world they inhabited but which a person intent on “solving” the events would take interest in.

I am saying that a person who did not know that mystery books needed to be “solved” would read these books and probably be annoyed that someone was killed and all anyone could talk about was this murder. This doesn’t happen because we generally understand what mystery books are.

There is a recent book by Stephen King in which he breaks the shadow narrative in two, writing a work in the form of a mystery and then never solving the mystery. The book, devoid of the context of “oh boy it’s Stephen King” but bearing the context of “it is a mystery book”, is annoying as living hell to anyone who fell for that. The book, in fact, has an afterword with you being given a pleasant talking to about how brilliant it was to have no solution to the mystery. Like a piece of metal that’s magnetized being twisted away from the natural magnetic field it wants to follow, a broken shadow narrative can really cause distress in the audience.

I had a friend give me Beethoven’s complete symphonies as a 30th birthday present. To accompany this, he gave me a one-hour lesson (it was very entertaining) on the history of music and specifically the rules and expectations of how music was crafted in Beethoven’s time and before. As it turns out, there were a bunch of expectations of format, construction and implementation that are, very simply, lost to a lot of modern ears. Beethoven, you see, would love to screw with the audience and knock them off guard, going in unusual places or mix-mastering up the structure. Now, however, most people just listen to them and enjoy them; there’s no broken shadow narrative for them.

This idea needs expansion and explanation, but it sits in my mind; I have a shadow narrative in the BBS documentary episodes, and there’s one for GET LAMP as well; I feel the movies are better for addressing it.

It’s getting to be time to finally put all people who were on the screen for the BBS Documentary up in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). As part of that, I browsed the entry to remind myself who’s missing.

IMDB has kind of tarted up since it was taken over by Amazon, and in fact it gives good information (generally) but pastes it over with crazy ads and integration into Amazon (although a “buy this right now” link isn’t so bad, even if it’s only for Amazon).

But the recommendations at the bottom got my attention:

Suddenly it became a interesting puzzle: Why was the Amazon/IMDB recommendation engine relating me with upskirt and panties-fetish movies?

I’m theorizing it’s either because they also got high ratings and were direct to video, or that someone named “Jason” is responsible for a lot of the work, including directing and cinematography. But it could be that hundreds of people, after reading my movie’s entry, spontaneously searched for upskirt videos. I don’t know, any of them seem plausible.

Bayesian Classification is fascinating to me, because I don’t get it, not even a little bit, but love the results. So it’s like raytracing, but with information. I just love the outcome. In this case, I’ll bet the engine has an amazing justification for “BBS + direct to video = Tits”, and if so, I WANT THAT ROUTINE.

If you’ve not heard of it before, there’s a “web feature” out there called “Zero Punctuation”. It’s basically a once-a-week video segment from a fellow named Yahtzee, who wrote a few adventures but is also, apparently, blessed with one of the best wits in the universe.

You don’t need to have played these games he talks about in his segments; you possibly don’t need to have played many video games at all. Instead he whips up, regularly, a beautiful and damning blend of biting sarcasm, deep cuts, and soaring highs into a five-minute animatic that leaves you truly breathless.

It is so good, it’s worth starting from the very beginning (an attack on the Sony game Heavenly Sword) and playing each segment twice to see all the details. He does one of my favorite narrative tricks, saying one thing but showing another and having the two points blend into an even funnier third point. That kind of work is rare these days and Yahtzee does it in episode after episode.

You even get to one of my favorite situations, where something goes by and it’s so clever that you end up pondering it, and by that time he’s made two more points and you’re desperately trying to keep up and you fail, forcing a restart from a few seconds before the first point. That’s not annoying, that’s breathtaking. Keep up, kiddo.

The episodes have a really annoying ad banner on them that you need to dispel and which doesn’t entirely go away, but even with that little lameness, the brilliance of the work shines through. Bravo.

10 years ago, I ran an anonymous remailer.

Before I explain it, let me show you the insanely pissed-off message I wrote when I closed it:

*** IMPORTANT NEWS REGARDING HAYSTACK@HOLY.COW.NET ***

- The Haystack Administration.

If that thing makes no sense, that’s fine. I’ll quickly explain it, along with a decade-past perspective on it.

So, way back when on the Internet, people were terrified. By “people”, I mean “White College-Educated Libertarians” and by Internet I mean “The somewhat closed-off-but-with-more-and-more-people-coming network” and by terrified I mean “terrified”.

Anybody who used the Internet for any amount of time knew that there was a good thing going on. You could connect all over the world, you had instantaneous connections, and you had a burst of free speech and transfer of information unlike anything the world had seen. This was what was so cool: you couldn’t over-exaggerate how fucking great it was. You would run out of superlatives before you ran out of Internet.

But part of what made it cool was that it was so free-feeling. Your little favorite idea or fetish, lambasted and marginalized in the world, could flourish and make its own space. Someone could say “fuck” as easily as they said “hello”, and it was all sorts of rough and tumble. This was heady, heady stuff. And there was, therefore, a terrified feeling that it was all going to go away.

Bad things happened back then, and still do. Laws were discussed and proposed that would ruin things. Policy fucks and law fucks and library fucks and academic fucks, all were slowly creeping into some massive shit-ball of dreary clampdown onslaught that was going to take this great Internet out and shoot it.

Bear in mind, of course, I mean the Internet between 1988 and 1995. There was a different Internet before that and a different Internet after that. But thanks to magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000 and all the Ziff-Davis crapshoots, there was this belief that the Internet had, by the early 1990s, achieved a manifest destiny of freedom and wonder that would be unsurpassed in our lifetimes and oh fuck here comes a law.

So in response, people started pushing ways to protect themselves against government and prying eyes and despicable boring people and all the general what-about-the-children types. One way was cryptography and another was anonymity.

Cryptography’s its own mess, but you basically could send pretty-likely-to-be-protected messages, between others, and even more importantly, could generate a hash table indicating that you were receiving an unmolested message, untouched by the government agents who were out to get your crap and make you look bad. If I’m making it sound like a touch of paranoia, well hells yes, this was paranoia. Not your garden variety paranoia with the slight unease of materials and natures you didn’t comprehend, but the even worse paranoia where you knew full well that people were entirely capable of doing crazy monitoring and life-destroying things to you and succeed. So you were paranoid, with some good reason.

Anonymity is the idea that people aren’t free unless you don’t know who they are. Otherwise, they are targets for reprisal, attacks, and general squashing of their ideas and lives. It is, one might say, a necessary vitamin strengthening the body of conversation and knowledge. If people can’t feel they won’t be targeted and pilloried for their statements, the ones they make will be hopelessly crippled and gaunt, lacking in the full force of ideas, like when you say the words ass flap while anonymous and aren’t poked with a stick. Very important, anonymity.

Whoever knew the right people got into Wired magazine and one of the groups who knew someone who knew someone was the “Cypherpunks”, their name a play off “Cyberpunks”, which was dedicated to strong cryptography and a host of other platforms I’m entirely at a loss to recall. Here’s Steven Levy’s big wet kiss to this organization, which is probably the main driving force that I can even remember them. Note that this is the second issue of Wired ever.

So I myself, being a rather young fellow at the time, was totally taken in by these lofty ideals. Promoting freedom and cryptography and anonymity was on my “will do when I can” list that stayed rather dormant through the years when I actually stopped being able to afford to eat regularly. I knew I would one day get regular meals and also be in a position to provide some sort of blow of these cypherpunkish ideals and the rest.

As it turned out, I got the position before I got the regular meals.

The position was running COW.NET, my totally off-the-wall what-the-hell internet service provider I ran from 1995-1998 as a for-profit entity before kicking out of that entirely. I will, more properly, write entries about cow.net’s South Boston period (as opposed to its Quincy period, Medford Period and other Periods) but now let’s dial back to the whole remailer thing.

Cow.net ran on some aging Sun 3/280s. These Suns had cost a bank and an airline $20,000 when they were bought, and I’d paid $300-$500 for them. One of them had come from X.ORG, actually, and I was slow in paying them (SEE: NOT EATING), and they had a whopping 30mhz CPU and 32megs of memory and pushed something like 15-20 amps. Huge, horrible things. And they were connected to the net by a 56k connection. Note, not a modem; a dedicated dropped-in telco line going to an RSU/DSU and the whole expectation we have today with a network room. This cost me roughly $500 a month. It was in a weird location and I was starving and people weren’t buying accounts as fast as I’d have liked but damnit, I was doing it!

So there I was in my position, and I thought I’d better make good on my promises to myself. So I put up an anonymous remailer.

A remailer (in my case, the software was called “mixmaster”) was a program where you could send out e-mail through an e-mail address, which would strip the headers, hold it for a random bit of time, and then blow it out into the world, or another remailer. Eventually, this message would make its way into the world, either posted on a newsgroup or in someone’s e-mail box, and there’d be no way to really trace where it came from.

This is all in theory, of course. Someone who was particularly paranoid could point out that I might be a federal agent, or my lines could be tapped, or someone could hack the box, or …. you know, good solid theoretical breaches. So people would often “chain” remailer stuff, bouncing a message between them, or sending them from anonymous-as-it-could-get-back-then connections and so on. In this way, your precious message and anonymity would be preserved.

What kind of messages would go through?

Oh, it ranged. I know of companies that would give my remailer e-mail address with instructions, so employees could honestly make anonymous suggestions. I know of people who used it to post messages about their medical experience as a doctor without revealing who they were. (Privacy to exploit privacy!) I know of people who threatened each other’s lives….

…oh, did I mention that? See, anything could happen, so naturally folks were assholes. I had someone use the remailer to tell someone that when he gave that speech this Friday, he’d be on a roof with a sniper rifle. I asked my friends what to do, and they suggested “wait until Saturday”. I did. Nobody died.

But this is the crunching-bone reality of these pie in the sky implementations of positive-outlook human interactions: just a dash of dumbass and many come crashing down. Relying on goodwill or a stern talking-to/indication of disappointment upon your shiny new tool being used to poke someone in the eye…. well, it’s what the kids call “full of fail”. You end up with a certain percentage of ass and eventually the ass minority becomes the ass majority and then you are trapped in ass.

So somewhere a year in, I gave up. My machine was being overused by all this, my connection (remember, 56k) was being hosed, and I was being consistently beat up for my actions, those kind of numb-nut rants that only a truly self-righteous somewhat-wronged individual can conceive of. I saw the writing on the wall.

But I’d done the good fight; haystack@holy.cow.net was a heck of a cool e-mail address, the theme of “you are the needle” was clever and in line with the “be revolutionary and fun” idealism I sucked down with a side of fries, and most importantly, I was not sued or arrested.

You can actually do a search to see some of the many fine postings used by the service over the year.

Would I do it again? Oh, likely. I do have ideals of doing the “right thing”, even if it gets a screwdriver in my nose. But either way, I won’t forget my lessons learned anytime soon.