I got a nice letter in the mail today.

Hi,
I may be contacting the wrong person, but were you involved in the
production of a short called "Conspiracy Rock" about the JFK
assassination?  I loved that and have been looking for a copy of it
for years.  Are copies available?

What’s touching about this is that he’s actually been looking for it for either 7 or 15 years. Quite a long time, indeed. And he’s right. I’m the person he’s talking about. Good detective work there, although I do believe I mentioned it in my BBS Documentary biography.

I don’t think I mentioned this in detail on this weblog, so here we go.

Back in college (I attended 1988-1992), my roommates were involved in a comedy troupe. Emerson College had three at the time: Emerson Comedy Workshop, This Is Pathetic, and Swolen Monkey Showcase. (The “Swolen” spelling was on purpose.) My roommates were involved with This is Pathetic.

TIP would do two shows a year, fun multi-hour shows that played off like a fun variety hour. There were skits, videos, musical numbers, the whole gamut. As it were, the people involved had a strong musical bent when I knew of it so there were actually a nice selection of musical pieces. Additionally, my roommate Scott Rosann had an incredible eye for filmmaking (he far outstrips mine) and so some really nice parodies were shot.

Anyway, at some point an idea was hatched to do a parody of Schoolhouse Rock, but to do it about the Kennedy Assassination. I have completely forgotten why this was thought to be a good idea, but I wasn’t in on that part. I know they assembled a lot of people for this, with both writers, musicians, and singers. Scott’s girlfriend was a background singer, one of the TIP members was the lead singer, and so on. It was quite something.

But the idea was to parody the Schoolhouse Rocks, so they asked me to do the animation. So, I got involved in it, and was eventually handed the soundtrack. I constructed a bunch of additional visual parody images related to this event, and to Schoolhouse Rock in central.

Traditionally, this sort of animation was done using cells, where you draw something and it’s on some plastic and you lay some plastic over the drawn backgrounds. (CAPS and the use of computers in animation was some time off for a college student.) I couldn’t do cells, so we did paper cutouts, and I was given a team of people, some of the singers, even, to sit there and methodically cut out different drawings I’d done so that if a character was in front of a frame, the frame was carefully cut out so we got that transparency effect even though there was no transparency to be had.

Emerson had an animation camera lab. In this lab, you had a camera aimed straight down, and then you could take a single shot, a single frame of animation, and then you’d swap out the elements and do the next frame. It was quite tedious. But wait, there’s more! To do things like fades, where you’d go from one thing to another, you would take 15 frames of something, and slowly close the lens after each frame until it was at 0, and then you would rewind 15 frames, replace the image with what it was fading to, and then take the 15 frames slowly opening to normal.

To know what went where, I had to listen to the recorded music and make notes to myself where various phrases came and went. Here’s a typical stanza from the song (to the tune of “Noun”):

A commission was appointed to look around
And to see whatever could be found
Some depositions were destroyed, a larger scandal to avoid
A commission was appointed to look around

So basically I had this audio track, which would I would listen to and make notes on a pad about how many frames each line was, along with any word points that might be relevant. (578) A Commission was (594) appointed to look around (605) And to see whatever (619) could be found (630)…. and so on.

In the case of the main body of the animation, it was a hopelessly complicated endeavor. There would be animation cycles (sets of character animation) for someone standing in front of an screen, with animation cycles within that. Since stealing is the way things are done, you can view the original “Noun” animation here on YouTube.

So I set about to copy as much of this as I could. I limited the animation as they did, had a lot of repetition, but also incorporated additional parody elements of Schoolhouse Rock. I recall my favorite joke was having the motorcade go by and the words “Bang! What was that?” show up, which were duplicated from another Schoolhouse Rock. It was quite the plan.

I have a memory relevant to this production worth noting.

I set off to do this animation in the animation room one night, and since it was a 3 minute animation, that meant shooting 4,320 frames. This is a lot of work. I knew it’d be a lot of work but it was REALLY a lot of work. I started to do it, to put it all together, and as the hours went on, and I was desperately keeping track of (at one point) five simultaneous integer counts, I just fuckin’ snapped. I mean, I totally lost it. We were bucking up against the deadline, it was the Monday before the show’s debut on Friday…. the pressure got to be too much. I came back to Scott at the apartment and just cried and cried. So many people, so much depending on me getting it right, and I had just completely gone off the rails. I was devastated.

Scott, showing his incredible people skills (he’s better at filmmaking AND people than I am), sat down with me, calmed me down, and asked simply, what was it I needed to be successful? What was missing? And I said I needed someone to help me. Maybe with someone else to take some of the number load off while I was tracking exposure levels and pulling the right set of drawings from the right folder (actual folders, mind you), then maybe I could pull it off.

The next night I was in there with Mike. This was a different TIP member than my roommate Mike, but a Mike I thought of as a hard-drinking, hard-druggin’ party-ass son of a bitch. Bearing in mind that I have never had alcohol or drugs, this meant he was probably entirely normal, but still, it was an odd-couple matchup we had going.

Well you know, he was the best fucking assistant you could ask for. He knew not from anything related to animation, and when I explained what was up, he just patiently did what I needed. Kept track of counts, handed me the right frames, and watched me re-use drawings constantly without too many questions. I was the animation guy and he was the numbers assistant, and we sailed through it as a team, over a few hours.

The film was taken to the processors, who got it back to us on Thursday. We took it back to Emerson’s film room and played the soundtrack and the film together to see what editing needed to be done, and in what I consider a miracle never to be duplicated, we didn’t need a single one. You heard right, the whole thing sync’ed up perfectly from start to finish, absolutely. From the first moment through to the last, it was timed perfectly. Thank you, Mike.

Then it was a matter of getting a place to do a film-video transfer on Friday morning, and that Friday night, we played it for the audience for the first time. It was a galactic hit. The initial animation happened, and the audience would think we did some little ten-second ha ha, and then it would go on for three minutes, a full-on cartoon with in-jokes, Schoolhouse Rock references and Kennedy Assassination ‘jokes’. It was edgy, fun, and weird.

Graduation came in 1992, and everyone went their separate ways. Then, in 1993, this thing happened.

I forgot who talked to who, but Comedy Central wanted to buy the rights to this thing for a year. I left it to Scott and the rest to negotiate, and for $1,200, Comedy Central got their rights. I’d moved onto temping but the word came down, that it was now going to be playing on the cable channel. In fact, they played it on the 30th anniversary of the assassination, which I thought was a little out there, but hey.

This cartoon got mentioned in a few small places, and I remember finding a reference in a column about how it was “the only good thing to come out of all the media surrounding the anniversary”. Very cute.

So we had $1,200 in cash but the fact was that the animation had something like 9 creators, and maybe more if you started counting singers and musicians and stuff. So what to do? Well, throw a party.

So we all blew the cash on renting a hotel room in Times Square for the New Year’s celebration, 1993-1994. We had it catered, and there were a few bedrooms in that thing. (I got a couch.) I remember sneaking out into the main times square just to be out there, and it was pretty crazy. I got to be in Times Square for the drop, and so I have that nice memory. Also, we’d all not seen each other since graduation, so it was kind of a reunion.

I didn’t see much of the gang after that, but they’d mostly moved away and I stayed in Boston, and that’s how life goes.

The animation had been sent to Saturday Night Live as a submission, but it’d been rejected. A few years later, they came out with Conspiracy Rock, a parody of Schoolhouse Rock. Yes, I am saying just what you think I’m saying.

The film went into memory, and I moved on to games and computers and all the rest of my sorry little life.

But somewhere in 1999, the word came down: it was going to play at Sundance.

It turned out that Scott and Mike and others had had this film at the end of a demo reel, kind of a fun little ender for people who were tolerant enough to sit through the reel. And when they sent some stuff to Sundance, the request came down, “we want the one at the end of the tape”.

So it played at 2000 Sundance, in the Shorts section. How about that. I considered going but my job at the time was a tad stress-ful and I couldn’t just disappear off to Utah. So I missed all that. But it was pretty weird to have something play at Sundance as part of the official program.

Now, at some point along this, you, the 21st century reading office, respond in kind: “Let us see this work, immediately, for free, with a single mouse click.” And you know, I’d even do that for you, but I don’t have a direct copy of it. I lent the video to someone and he never returned it, and Scott or Mike never digitized it, so it’s kind of in limbo. It’s on my list of “things to digitize” but I haven’t done it. The film/tape is sitting in my office as one of the to-do piles. I have a lot of to-do piles, as you might guess.

Every once in a while, someone reminds me I did this, and I’m happy to be reminded. I should reward them with a copy of it someday. Maybe this’ll be the year, 15 years later.

UPDATE: Well, I’ll be. A pristine version of it is now online: Ladies and Gentlemen, Conspiracy Rock.

There’s this slightly ugly trend that’s been going on in documentary filmmaking for a while. I’m sure it has some roots going many years back, but it’s come into my radar and I’m not sure how well it’s been covered or mentioned, so I figured I might as well pipe up.

Succinctly: For years, promoters and production types have been approaching documentary filmmakers, people who have dug some sort of story from reality, and have purchased the fictional remake rights.

I will be the first to admit I’m rather curmudgeonly about the documentary form, considering it a very special genre of film in which directors are implicitly making promises to the audience, promises that they could easily renege on without the audience being the wiser. The audience, to some level, is brought to believe that what they’re seeing is either filmed reality or film composed from reality. How much any member of the audience is willing to accept this for any amount of time is up in the air, but when you see action occurring, you think that you’re seeing filmed reality, and when you see people talking to the camera, you think you’re seeing someone being in some way interviewed in actual reality. All interviews can be cut weird and all interviewees can lie, but they’re really lying, like someone who is standing in front of you might be lying to you.

There are films that ape the documentary style, for example Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, in which his characters seem to be followed by a documentary crew and the people within it are answering interview questions at various juncture points throughout the film. It brings in a strange other reality for the film, and someone who doesn’t know who Woody Allen is might think this was a real documentary. There was a film I saw in film school which appears in every way to be a documentary about a girl going out and the cameraman is interviewing her and at some point she breaks down and reveals she was recently raped, and the students watching it were shocked when it had credits of actors playing the parts and we were told it was a scripted fictional play. This is all grey area and artists being artists so I don’t have much to say about them other than maintaining they should have truthful labels and not be filed under “documentary”.

Conversely, there is a scene at the end of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine that I do consider a breach of trust: He hammers Charlton Heston about gun control, which is fine, and typical journalistic assholery towards a greater good, perceived or otherwise. But at the end of this sequence, Heston walks away, and Moore calls him to show him a picture of a little girl who died from a shooting. This scene is impossible. The reverse shot we see simply cannot have been filmed at the same time we see Heston reacting to a photo. Moore might be actually showing the photo in the shot with Heston in the background and Moore in the foreground, but that reverse shot is being done at a later time, before they leave the grounds. Flat out. I consider that a lie, no matter how much it clears up the narrative flow for Moore’s editors. There is no grey area for me, I consider it wrong.

But I have no such concerns about most movies, even ones “based on a true story”. Even I know that when something is “based on a true story” it could mean that there once was a real story about someone, and all it shares with this story is both guys owned a dog. Or they lived in Portland, Oregon. Or they had a wife named Jill. It’s complete fluff and irrelevant that it was “based on a true story” just as much as that it’s “filmed on location”. I don’t apply any standard to it and dismiss it as fiction and enjoy or don’t enjoy it on its merits.

Such a low consideration, then, becomes problematic when that fictionalized story is “based upon” a documentary, especially when in all ways the documentary is based off of reality and therefore you know it’s not just a small overlap of details but many of them, and that what you are seeing is a hyped-up action-packed remake of real events. That brings in something, some weight or cachet, that an audience, including myself, might put upon the work. That’s significant.

There was a film called Dogtown and Z-Boys which I saw back in 2001 at my local theater, which I really enjoyed. I forgot why I wanted to see it other than I was really getting into documentaries and this one looked pretty cool and so off I went. I was really taken with how great the editing was, how it had so much vintage footage and portrayal of all these events, and I was also blown away by how good it looked. This was, in some ways, what strengthened my resolve to the idea that I, too, would make a documentary.

The issue, however, is that the film has a couple problematic aspects that I wasn’t aware of at the time. For example, one of the people in it, Stacy Peralta, is also the director. That’s not a fantastic situation, to have your movie be about something and you’re one of the major players in the story. Glen Friedman, a photographer for skateboard magazine, is an interviewee and also a producer of the film. The film is also funded by Vans, a shoe and apparel company. An article that goes in all sorts of pointing-finger detail about this is here.

But all that aside, what happened was that four years later, we had a fictional film based on the documentary, based on reality. Called Lords of Dogtown, this coming of age story used real people’s names, remixes some of the events, and has actual people in cameos near characters playing them. Are you going to watch it on its own merits? Or are you thinking that, because it’s based on a real story, it’s got some additional weight to throw around because things you’re watching are “reality”? It is, in other words, successfully more troubling than the original Dogtown documentary.

From here, my concerns about there being a trend start to fall together. Grey Gardens (1975), considered to be one of the classics of documentary form, is about the story of two distant relatives of Jackie Kennedy, living their lives in a dilapidated house and going some form of Mad. Grey Gardens (2008) is to be a fictionalized version of same, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange playing the parts of the two women from the first documentary, and a few dozen additional actors thrown into the mix. This new fictional film should also not be confused with The Beales of Grey Gardens (2006), which is another documentary by the same documentary filmmakers who made the 1975 Gardens.

And before the question comes to you, yes, I was approached on several occasions to sell or otherwise collaborate on fictionalized versions of the BBS Documentary. In one case one of the reporters who told my story was asked if we wanted to collaborate on a book or film, and in another case I was approached directly by a smiling, smarmy producer type who was more than happy to help me realize the full potential of my project by making a fictional script and who quickly became insulting, abusive and phone-throwing when I told him in impolite terms my own version of “fuck off”. I was let into a lot of homes and told a lot of special stories by a lot of people who trusted me. I consider turning around and making Wargames with more tits to be a betrayal of that trust.

So I started asking filmmakers, when I went to their screenings, and after the question period had ended and I was chatting them up at a later time, if they too had been approached for the fictional/story rights. So far, basically all have. Some had even sold them, before the film was even released. I think this is now the norm and is being done consistently. Or, conversely, is well on its way to being consistent in the case of unique stories that can’t just be made up without obvious pointing to the original documentary.

I don’t like this at all, not one bit. I consider it strip-mining of the worst sort, taking stories of people that are being told in these crafted works, and then turning them out on the street corner to be jazzed up, dashed about, tarted around with death and lipstick and repackaged again and again. I’m sure there’s a thousand little stories the directors can tell themselves about why this is a fantastic idea, but I am not in the least bit interested.

But the tragic part, or maybe the best part of all, is there’s nothing I can really do about this. It’s just another revenue stream being exploited, another quick-fix to sagging storylines that’s patched on, another cheap trick in an industry that prides itself on cheap tricks.

But I thought you might like to know about it.

I’ll be attending Shmoocon next month, the weekend of the 16th of February. This will be of interest to some people because my presentation will include actual GET LAMP edited footage.

The schedule’s over here, and there I am at 3pm on Saturday. The conference is basically sold out, so unless you have a ticket already, I don’t think you’re going to get in. Feel free to hang out with me in the hotel lobby, however. I’ll be there a lot.

Last year I punched the One Laptop Per Child in the face, and that was an enjoyable time. (I wrote about it here.) It even got some press, here and here and so on.

What exactly am I showing? Well, I’ve been editing a massive set of sequences about the cave Adventure is based on, so I’ll be showing those, as well as talking about the processes the Cave Research Foundation use for safety and tracking, and a bunch of related stuff to these two subjects. I’ll do my best to record and get some of the talk online at some point.

Always a good time at the Shmoo.

The ANSI Art show I attended earlier this month got a little video coverage, courtesy of Geek Entertainment, a “web-broadcast” television show that purports to cover some sort of general geek-relevant topics, which the site lists as “web 2.0, tagging, AJAX, social software and the bubble juice known as VCs”. All well and good.

The episode is certainly useful for some nice video footage of the gallery and how packed it was, and the appearance of one of my heroes Jacob Appelbaum in an interview was a nice bonus. You see the scrolling ANSIs, the dedicated ANSI circuit boards (I purchased one) and a bunch of other details in there. Again, all fine and good.

But I guess I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided or missed out on the “journalist” Irina Slutsky, who is the blonde microphone-wielding terror that provides the bulk of the commentary/description of the context of ANSI art. Holy hamburger in a can is she horrible.

Fine, apologists can explain to me in grating detail that the short turnaround for getting these microvideos out the door would necessitate a few shortcuts, but the descriptions she blorts out are beyond mere speediness and into negligence.

Using phrases like “secret identity in the nether regions of the web-er-net” strikes me as what it probably is, a disposable, hipster reference to internet culture, one in this case that spans decades, because it sounds like you have even a middling grasp on its context. Which she doesn’t.

If it matters at all, I went to school for just what she’s doing, that is, attempting to not look like an idiot on video, and having the camera continue to focus on her while she dumbly nods along doesn’t do anyone any favors either. “AND WHAT IS BBS?” is not, if you’d pardon the term, hard-hitting journalism. And while we’re over here, “So here I am with” is not the best way to start with every fucking shot.

I think if this was called “WebNet Now!” or some other generic, meaningless title, I wouldn’t be so bothered, but you’d think that something with the word “Geek” in the title wouldn’t be filled to the brim, and I mean absolutely jam-packed, with such poorly-constructed pseudo-news that acts like the people watching weren’t born 30-60 minutes ago. Geek, after all, is quite a provocative word, and part of the pride of geekdom is that if you don’t know something, you possess the skills to look it up instantaneously and integrate it into your own personal “web-er-net”.

Do I have an example of someone doing it right? Well, I was interviewed by Kevin Pereira for the now-gone G4 series “Pulse” about my BBS Documentary. We talked for an hour on the phone, and then he came out to interview me with a crew, and then the whole thing was cut together into a story about my project. I found it treated me with respect, got the message across, and while there were shortcuts within it that I wouldn’t have approved of in the editing room, you never felt like Kevin, or myself, or my subject, were fuckin’ idiots.

Here’s that news story. Sorry, it’s a 30 megabyte WMV file, but that’s what VLC is for.

I see no excuse for a “Geek” show to be so insulting and stupid, and I’ll be glad never to watch it again.

I have a soft spot in my heart, maybe even a warm and loving relationship, with speed runs.

Speed runs, in this case, refers to a genre of video game recordings wherein people play through a game as fast as they possibly can.

The gold standard for me is “Quake Done Quick (With a Vengeance)” which is a sequel to Quake Done Quick, and represents a speed-run through the iD software game Quake at its most vicious difficulty, and which utterly decimates the point of the game in favor of a level of speed that you wouldn’t think was possible. How fast? Well, there are levels which they complete in nine seconds. If you watch this film and know anything about how the game works, then seeing the tricks employed are magical. (There’s a Google Video version up for quick and easy browsing.)

How do they go through a level in 9 seconds? Well, one of the cinematic aspects of the Quake game was having the exit for the level just tantalizingly out of reach, perhaps viewable from the bottom of a huge room, or across an uncrossable chasm. The actual physical distance of each level exit was short but the built-in puzzle aspect meant that to really achieve that nearby goal was to go through an enormous amount of hurdles. Well, since Quake Done Quick would use tricks to make uncrossable things crossable or high-altitude exits reachable, that massive set-up would just melt away.

After a short time, people who played Quake discovered an interesting technique, which was shared far and wide: rocket jumping (or conversely, grenade jumping). To increase a sense of realism, the Quake engine had a nice trick where an explosion near you would throw your body away from the center of it. So if a rocket blew up to your right, you’d find yourself hurt badly and thrown to the left. Well, all one had to do was jump and aim a rocket below you at the floor, and its explosion would increase the jump by a noticeable degree. Oh yeah, it’d hurt, make no mistake. But you’d go higher and so you’d find yourself in a place that you weren’t supposed to be able to reach, usually with lots of health to make up for your entirely sociopathic and suicidal act. It most likely didn’t occur to the playtesters that someone would use this technique to actually advance in a level, or hurt themselves insanely to manipulate access throughout a game’s map. But they did, they do, and Quake Done Quick shows this technique used to the hilt.

There are multiple places in that video where I see someone throw a grenade and jump on it for lift. In one case, they throw the grenade while swimming in water, and arrive at said grenade at just the perfect time to blow themselves upward to a distantly high shelf, and solve the level in 13 seconds. In another, they throw a grenade off a ledge, jump off the ledge and land perfectly on the exploding grenade to fling themselves up the same distance to an opposite ledge. This is Cirque Du Soleil for gamers.

Like a lot of such weird hobbies, there’s been a number of variations upon the themes and techniques so that they have to be demarcated clearly before you watch them. One of these is the idea of “tool-assisted” speed runs. In these cases, you use an emulator and/or constant reloading to get the most perfect game. Sometimes you slow down the game to half speed, play at that level, and then return the game to full speed when you play it back. In these levels, you go from it being amazing, to a sort of bizarre art. Watch, for example, this video of Super Mario 3 in tool-assisted mode, and then skip ahead to 2 minutes in and watch what appears to be God Almighty playing Nintendo.

Like any “sport”, the use of this sort of enhancement can lead to accusations of cheating or not playing fair, and I certainly agree that comparing a game played by a single person in one take and one played by multiple people doing thousands of takes is not legitimate. But I do think there’s a place for both these approaches.

The two big tracking organizations in this are The Speed Demos Archive and Tool-Assisted Speed Runs, which do their best to provide the most up-to-date short-timed videos of played games in existence. I am especially taken with the level of precision that TASvideos keeps in terms of what techniques are used, what to watch for, who did it, and so on. But both are pretty kick-ass.

But there’s one set of speed runs I just can’t seem to get enough of, and that’s Super Mario 64.

I get a little weird about that game because of several bits about it that really amaze me. First of all, I really do consider it a perfect 10 out of 10. It got a 10 in several magazines at the time of its release in 1996, and because gaming culture generates controversy and flatulence, this was a big deal. To get a ten, some speculated, meant there could never be a more perfect game. This is, of course, retarded, but like I said, retarded is fuel for gaming culture, so it bounced back and forth for a while. But I am firmly on the side that in 1996, Super Mario 64 was truly a perfect 10 of a game. The variation, the game play, the massive size of it, was all just fantastic.

Such is that perfection that watching people play it quickly using all manner of tricks and glitches, is hypnotizing and attractive to me. In the game you collect stars. There are 120 possible stars in the game. Once you collect 70, you can actually “win” the game, although it’s only when you track down and win all 120 that you get the real kudos. So, people have successfully played through the game, tool assisted and not. Here is a 120 star tool-assisted speed run, which takes about an hour and 41 minutes to complete. It’s quite beautiful to me.

But it turns out you can glitch the system; there was the “bunny trick”. At one point in the game, about sixteen stars in, you are able to chase down and catch a bunny. When you do this, he gives you a star. But more than that, it lets you walk around with the captured bunny post capture. And even more than that, there is a bug where you can drop and pick up the bunny quickly and it stops paying attention to doors. As a result of this little oversight, you can get through a door that’s not supposed to be openable until way further along the game, and which allows you to get to the final boss and win the game having only sixteen stars captured.

It is too easy to focus on the fact that the trick works rather than why. It works because the door is a real thing, that will eventually open. This may sound obvious, but it’s not. In years previous to games like Super Mario 64, just because there was a door somewhere didn’t mean that there was anything behind that door. That door was, effectively, a painting that was later replaced with a real door when all the objects you needed were assembled. But before then, there was nothing you could do to get through that door, because, again, not a real door. But in the era of Mario 64, that means that there was a working set of rooms, all functioning, all in place, and it was only the addition of new powers or the ability to unlock portals that granted you access to this persistent environment. This is both minor, and the most important thing in the world.

The sixteen-star hack was amazing. But then someone did it in 1 star.

To do it in one star, they had to depend on an interesting glitch in the system, where if you jammed little mario in a strange location in the first room of the castle, it would blow him into another piece of the map. It’s surreal to watch, like something out of the Matrix. One moment he’s jumping around and the next moment he’s flying through the castle at top speed and jammed into a door, which he should never have gotten into.

And then someone used this trick to do it in zero stars. Zero stars! He walks into the castle, as any tourist and rube and then he’s face to face with the final boss, ready to kick some ass. Here’s a youtube link of this action, and it’s at the 1:10 mark that you say to yourself “you ok, little guy?” and then he’s suddenly blowing through the castle at 100mph and right into a high-end level. And then he just keeps going from there. The run is tool-assisted but still great to watch. And zero stars.

I have issues with the terms “cheating” as being applied here, sicne it’s made clear that the emulator and slowdown techniques are in play. But more than that, there’s a greater situation here.

During the GET LAMP documentary, one person puts forward the theory that we, as people, are changed by technology. As technology advances and we absorb this into our daily lives, we internally change our processes and selves to accommodate this new methodology. I buy into this theory entirely. So what I am saying is that the people who play Quake Done Quick or who slam Mario with zero stars are not the same human beings the games were written for. A decade of time, learning new ways to play games, changes your relationship to the original games, and so what is meant to be reliant on your lack of familiarity with the world is no longer to the game’s advantage. I can think of no more appropriate example of this, than speed runs.

I wrote this in two hours. I look forward to your film of you doing this faster.

We’ve finished assembling the speaker’s list for Blockparty 2008, the second Blockparty. Here’s the list, as it appears on the site.

The Fat Man: Art Behind Enemy Lines: A Target-Rich Environment

In the first five minutes of his talk, Fat will define Art once and for all,
especially in context of high technology creation and experience. Thus
having taken the mystery out of it and having reduced it to a science, he
will quickly realize that he has ruined the whole damn thing. The rest of the
talk will consist of his backpedalling like mad, trying in vain to put the
cork back in the giant monkey’s butt before the whole Blockparty is covered
with icky, sticky dogma.

The Fat Man, George Alistair Sanger, has been creating music and other
audio for games since 1983. He is internationally recognized for having contributed
to the atmosphere of over 250 games, including such sound-barrier-breaking greats
as Loom, Wing Commander I and II, The 7th Guest I and II, NASCAR Racing, Putt-Putt
Saves the Zoo, and ATF. He wrote the first General MIDI soundtrack for a game,
the first direct-to-MIDI live recording of musicians, the first redbook soundtrack
included with the game as a separate disk, the first music for a game that was
considered a “work of art,” and the first soundtrack that was considered a
selling point for the game.

On a 380-acre ranch on the Guadalupe River, The Fat Man hosts the annual
Texas Interactive Music Conference and BBQ (Project Bar-B-Q), the computer/music
industry’s most prestigious and influential conference.

Jake “virt” Kaufman: FM Synthesis – Beyond the Adlib

Like Silly Putty, potato chips, and penicillin, FM synthesis was a delightful accident. It was most famously used in the Yamaha DX-7 keyboard,
allegedly designed by the Japanese as revenge for World War II, and seen by the knob-twisting analog crowd as “like trying to paint your hallway
from outside through the letterbox.” Despite this, it took pop music by storm, and inexpensive one-chip FM synthesizers flooded into in video
games, home computers, and even mobile phones.

Luckily for us, an entire industry of pointy-headed sound programmers has largely tamed FM since the 80s, and figured out how to create every type
of sound imaginable. In an uncanny impression of an expert synthesist, Jake will show that for all its mathematical intrigue and spy-novel
thrills, FM is easy, free, and fun to use, and sounds neat!

Jake Kaufman is equally happy writing for a Game Boy or an orchestra. He recently created music and sound effects for Konami’s Contra 4 for the
Nintendo DS, described by critics as “awesome” and “dude, awesome”. Following in the footsteps of pioneers like the Fat Man (see above), he aims
to advance the state of the art even as he squeezes every drop of goodness out of older technology. He participates in the chiptune community and
the demoscene, and is the founder of VGMix, a site devoted to fan arrangements of game music.

Fred Owsley: Circuit-Bending Will Get You Laid!! (Maybe)

Circuit-Bending is the art of taking things apart, putting them back
together, and ending up with a brand new, completely unexpected
mutation of the original parts. Think of sampling, but with hardware.
Nothing’s out of bounds when you circuit-bend the piles of consumer
electronics available around you, and the results can be insightful, weird,
or just a great way to spend a weekend. Circuit-bender Fred Owsley will
walk you though an introduction to the tools and trades of circuit-bending
as well as show off his own recent works involving everything from a
gas mask to a “that was easy” button that is anything but easy.

From a very young age, Fred has always liked to take things apart,
from all his toys to the interior of the family van, few screws were
left intact. With an interest in electronic music, a soldering iron,
some electronics know-how and toys from goodwill, he started circuit
bending in 2005. So far his projects have included various keyboards,
keytars, a gas mask, a musini, and a recently finished x0xb0x. When
not at his regular job as a computer security researcher, he can be
found at his workbench abusing some electronic toy into producing
amazingly horrible noise.

Jim “Trixter” Leonard: Self-Preservation Mode: Lessons Learned While Archiving Demoscene History

To stay ahead of the curve, demos have always used hardware to the fullest extent available, sometimes in unorthodox and unauthorized ways. But when that hardware becomes yesterday’s news, it is those very tricks that cause such demos to become lost to history. For half a decade, Hornet has been working on the Mindcandy series, a collection of DVDs reproducing demos to the best of their ability. But what’s involved in that process? Trixter of Hornet will discuss how a combination of ebay, charity, and outright fakery can be used to restore for the present what has nearly been lost to the past, and how you can apply these techniques to your own archival projects.

Jim Leonard is the founder of MobyGames, the world’s largest online game database,
and the MindCandy series of demoscene DVDs. Jim was involved in the PC demo scene in the 1990s as well
as the archival demogroup Hornet, and the residual flashbacks of that episode prompt him to code 8088 assembler for fun in his spare time.
Every few months, some part of the Internet discovers “8088 Corruption” and freaks out. Jim, meanwhile is musing about Mindcandy Part III and the next big thing to save.

Jeri Ellsworth: CPU Not Required: Making Demos with FPGAs

In the endless battle to make your demo quicker, more impressive and yet
still balance the changes in CPU, a whole other way of approaching this
situation exists: FPGAs. Short for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, this
dedicated hardware, well-documented and fun to program, will give you
speed and flexibility that a world of softcode and compilers just can’t
touch. After going over the basics of this hardware, a simple demo will be
presented and the process explained.

Jeri Ellsworth is best known as the engineer behind the C64-DTV, a
Commodore-64-in-a-Joystick that has sold over half a million units. She
has founded a computer chain, designed race cars, and is hard at work
building a classic arcade in Oregon.

Tim Cowley: Automated Psychedelia : Translating sound into color and motion

If you’ve always wanted to know how to create programs that simulate the neurological disorder ’synesthesia’, or the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, look no further! This seminar will rocket through a brief history of psychedelia and synesthesia and how it relates to computer graphics and music, define key technological elements of a generic music visualization framework, discuss important problems relating to meaning extraction and presentation, and present a simple HLSL-powered, graphics hacker oriented, visualization framework. All of the source code for the framework will be available as well.

Madman. Genius. Visionary. Psychonaut. Graphics God. Bodhisattva. These are all words that Tim Cowley would write into his own bio, if he were a little
more arrogant. Tim has been shovelling triangles as fast as he could since he got his hands on an OpenGL Red book in 1999. Since 2003, he’s been making
demos with the Northern Dragons, on the GBA, PSP, in TextMode, and occasionally using one of them expensive ‘graphics cards.’ He currently works on the
3d engine inside MS Office, is preparing to start his M.Sc. at Digipen, and is about to reach 1 million downloads on
the Psychedelia visualization pack.

Oh, there’s been some great hits in my webserving past. The word gets out, and thousands of people start visiting a specific URL or location on one of my sites. This has included the “Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass” weblog entry on this site (78,000 visitors in a single day) and Koalas are Little Bitches (30,000 in a single day). And there’s even been a few cases of the mass of bandwidth being unfathomable, like when I idly mentioned having 1,700 arcade manuals. That one killed a ten megabit connection for a week.

But in terms of sheer numbers, I’ve never encountered anything like Jesus Cat.

I collect flash animations. Of course, I collect a lot more than just flash animations, but I definitely collect flash animations. I use scrapers on 4chan and other sites, and I actually sort them out. The result has been tens of thousands of these things. Some are horrifying (animals are killed, or someone falls to their death). Some are bizzare (animations combining all sorts of people and images in a non-sequitir manner). And some are just music played to something funny.

One of these is Jesus Cat, which is meant to be as silly as it seems. Nothing big, that’s just what it is. (It plays music, in case you’re somewhere you’d prefer not to hear music.)

It’s not a particularly deep creation: a cat jumps out of a boat and walks on water to the shore, to the tune of Our God is an Awesome God and with the words “Jesus Cat” pulsing in the corner. It’s 371k, almost instantaneous on many connections.

Whatever reaction you get in the first 4 seconds is about all you’re going to get out of it; it loops forever, and any amount of time watching it reveals what’s going on: shallow water, cat trying to get back to land, just hops in the shallow water and is free. Someone’s doing some work in the water behind him and easily belies the depth of the pond at this location. In other words, under analysis, it utterly falls apart. It’s a simple eye trick, and the music and words (in the opposite corner) distract you enough for the conjunctive disorder that might make you laugh. Or not.

I happened to show this to an IRC channel, and linked to a “stuff I have lying around” directory on one of my servers.

Two days later, 91,000 people visited.

And it was that specific URL too, and since I didn’t put it anywhere other than that channel, once, it meant someone gave it to someone else, or pasted it in another IRC channel, and then it just exploded outward. I see 3,000 matches for the original URL, and if you spend the time browsing them, you find lots of commentary. I’ll save you time and tell you the general responses:

• Hilarious!
• Stupid.
• That cat’s not REALLY walking on water.
• This reminds me of endless other cat stuff HERE’S SOME LINKS
• I will now riff on the idea of a cat as a savior for the next paragraph.

91,000 throws it way past anything I’ve done, ever with regards to serving a popular file. Some of the others might have more longevity over the Jesus Cat (the Goatse article, for example, is still packing them in a year later) but for sheer popularity, Jesus Cat stands above them all.

God bless his wet, matted little fur.

I suppose I could come up with lame “look I’m better than those people” theories about why the cat is so popular, but I’m rather sure it’s because it’s compact, gets what it wants to get across, and is 371k. You go and you’re there. And two words, Jesus Cat, sum up the entire experience for you. If I had to pin it on anything, I’d go for that: ease and compactness. It is truly Dawkins’ idea of a meme, a replicating virus that uses human brains.

And now I spread it again. Oh no.

Editing in earnest began on the GET LAMP project over the weekend.

There’s still a tiny set of interviews left to do, as well as a continually open door to a couple of people who said no to change their minds. But with roughly 80 interviews done, totaling 100 hours, I think we can make a movie here.

When I started out on the BBS Documentary I didn’t know its length or involvement and by the time I was editing I didn’t know much about the process other than blind faith I’d make something worthwhile from it. This time around I know the length, involvement and the process, and I also have this weblog. So I figured I’d give you some on-the-outset thoughts about editing, should some aspiring filmmaker or other person who deals in putting together pieces of stuff want my opinion on the whole thing.

The process of making a documentary film, at least as I go about it, doesn’t jibe much with the approach of making movies, or fictional ones. You don’t really have a script, but instead have a thing you wish to make the movie about. Maybe that thing is an event, maybe a person. You might even have some ideas of what you think will be in the final work. But you don’t know know, like one who knows that tomorrow we’re going to have the lead actor punch out his rival and get into a sports car and drive off. With a scripted film, everything is at least set in drying concrete with some mixups happening later as logic or opportunity intrudes.

I also count “reality television” as fictional television, even though you’re using amateurs or doing a “what will happen” vibe to what is an event where it is all basically on rails. Sure, you might not know that a member in the second team would have a crying jag and you might not know the happy reaction of the family to the new look of the rebuilt home, but you can pretty much leave a bunch of little buckets in place so that your editors can assemble the rough outline before anything’s been shot. Television is fake. Fake fake fake, and that’s the way it is.

I went into GET LAMP knowing it would cover text adventures, and it certainly does that. I had a list of stuff that most people would reasonably expect to see in a documentary about text adventures: Infocom, Adventure, Scott Adams, “Modern” IF, Zork. If you browse cases where news of this documentary got out, a lot of people kind of hit those touchpoints in reaction. So, text adventures, short list, got it.

As I studied the subject, however, I got more into the idea of how it was less about Games than Writers. To write interactive fiction, to think that way and to approach that method of making a written work, is very unique to this subject. A videogame documentary, one covering the history of computer games or one lauding the latest trends in gaming industries will not generally focus on the idea of the writing process, just the output. I don’t mean they won’t include the programmers/creators, but that they won’t talk to those creators about where their ideas come from or how they think of their audience or how they think of their work being manipulated by the players. So I definitely added that.

In doing that I expanded my interview roster to people who were involved in interactive fiction in all its forms; so I got the creator of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I got one of the US Poet Laureates, Robert Pinsky, to weigh in on the time he made a text adventure. There’s an interview with a creator of interactive comic books. There’s a couple straight-on writer types who dabbled in interactive fiction long ago but went the linear route. And there’s people who ran MUDs (and in two cases, created MUD and TinyMUD, respectively).

What is your special sauce, the business types say. What distinguishes you from a hundred other people doing the same thing? Why will people remember how you do stuff, as opposed to everyone else. My special sauce is a crazy-wide cast net, where I bring in people who seem completely unconnected to the subject but are connected quite closely indeed.

Before I move on, I have to stress something, and that’s that my methodology of editing is a product of the present. It utilizes digital non-linear editing, and a host of computer hardware and storage that is unrealistic for someone to have done even a decade ago. None of my movie has ever touched a negative. Only 40 minutes of the 100 hours even saw videotape. Pretty much all of it went from a plug-in card with chips in it to a bank of disk drives and ultimately DVD-ROMs for longer-term storage/backup. To compare how I did this documentary to, say, Hoop Dreams and neglect the fact that Hoop Dreams utilized Betacam videotape and no hard drives for film storage, really does them a disservice. Not only did a film like that amaze and astound, but it’s a galaxy away from where I’m sitting. I would not have one hundreth of the opportunity I do now to approach this subject without these advancements and the way I did things would cost hundreds of thousands instead of merely thousands.

When you’re interviewing people, you have a series of questions you want to ask, some pre-written and some not. It’s universally thought that going entirely off a set of pre-formatted questions is bad, but going completely off-list is bad too. I have a number of questions I ask that are very easy to answer, followed by questions that are not so easy or which I construct on the fly while listening to the answers. I recently did an interview with a subject where I started to ask questions as if he was a programmer, but I had this spontaneous realization that he was better answering questions about writing than programming so I concentrated almost entirely on writing. I didn’t know where I was going to end up beforehand, or at least, I didn’t really know until I sat down.

The interviews for GET LAMP are a lot shorter than they were for BBS Documentary, mostly because the subject is more directed but also because I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with the process. I don’t need to make every single person give the same statement, or say the same things, when it’s obvious I’ll only be able to use a couple in a final work. I conducted an interview last year at a friend’s house, using his living room as a location, and when I was finished and saw the subject off, my friend said “Was he no good?” and I said “No, he answered everything I needed.” and the reason for this confusion was because I’d interviewed my buddy for over two hours for his sit-down and here I was doing an interview in about 25 minutes. But I only needed 25 minutes to get what I needed this time.

Interviews consist of me asking questions and people answering them on-camera. Sometimes a person is the type who you mention “what do you think of computers” and you get a 15 minute monologue (with lots of great bits), and other times they’re the type of person who is completely unsure what to say and need prompting or discussion. Just like you might not be able to describe much of what was on the walls in your elementary schoolroom, so does someone “famous” for something or “an expert” in something not necessarily remember the level of detail a question entails. So there’s a lot of recording of me telling stories, jokes, references, or pulling something from what I picked up to bring out the memories. Fishing expeditions, they call it. A lot of waiting and a lot of dead time, but that’s fine; it’s just bits after all. At the end of this recording, we might have a 40 minute interview with 30 minutes of the subject talking. So we’re already down from the 100 hour figure.

I go through these interviews and pick out the subjects. If a person describes playing Adventure, that’s a subject that won’t end up relating to Infocom. If a person talks about writing a modern IF game, that doesn’t overlap with tales of working on microcomputers of the 1980s, unless they specifically compare them.

So basically, I end up with a pile of clips. I have descriptions of the clips, with all the subjects touched in them, and then I store them all together by theme. Sometimes the theme is obvious and other times not so obvious. And naturally, I have to keep going, in my mind, a few of the not-quite-in-theme clips and how they might be used down the line. If I have someone saying things were one way and another clip of someone disagreeing, specifically, with that person, I kind of keep that link in my head for a while. Another example is where I have a recording of someone getting a look on their face that might be a useful reaction shot to something, and that sort of ethereal, fragile component could be overlooked as editing progresses.

Eventually, though, I am facing a timeline. This timeline will eventually be the movie or a bonus feature or other self-contained set of shots. This is where I will spend the most time editing.

Film Editing is, after all, the changing of an untouched recorded reality and manipulating it to some end. In my case, the end is primarily clarity and correlation, but there’s probably some other themes as well. Entertainment? Emotion? In any event, I want the final composition to reflect, in some way, the actual story or event that I am calling the film’s subject.

As I flip through dozens of clips about a subject, say, the creating of a modern text adventure, I will have any statements made by anyone about the subject in my folder. Some of it will be the opinion of people who don’t actually do the thing being talked about. Other bits will be the people actually creating them. Some of it will be people who once made text adventures with their thoughts on current authors following in their footsteps. I start assembling these in groups on the timeline.

At this point, the film I’m putting together has two attributes. It is boring, and it is nonsensical. To watch it at this point would make most people think I was the worst filmmaker ever. Endless swaths of people saying the same thing, statements that don’t match up to anything, even clips that aren’t really related to the subject being covered. And it’s actually even more intensive than that; the clips that I do clump together betray themselves as having only a tiny, tiny piece that could ever really end up in the flick. I relate this to trying to determine if you should make a new kitchen, and so you rebuild a replica of your entire home, down to the carpets and furniture, replace the kitchen on it, and then, if you like the kitchen, burn this entire house replica down and go back to the real house and make a kitchen.

I will have flown to a person’s town, rented a car, hauled equipment, set up in their home (an appointment months or years in the making), interview them for an hour, go home, and then look at the hour and pull out 5 minutes. And then use 30 seconds of that five minutes. It is very much like gold panning, the way I do it.

The digital way of doing things makes my job very easy, though. If I “discard” footage, even cut a clip to ribbons, I can make it all come back again. I yank things in all directions, and can even say to myself “I need a few more seconds of this person breathing” or “I cut off the scene too late” and by pulling a little lever, it all comes back. No assistants running down to the vaults, no sweating the rental time for the suite, no trying to remember which reel and number I pulled this stuff from; it’s all just right there. I’m therefore more fearless in my cuts, more quick to try ten different ways, and more likely, down the road, to completely shake things up.

Everything I initially put together, probably even including the first cut, will be changed for the final. Since I shot in HD I have things like color correction, sound sweetening, and codec translation to worry about, but that’s actually the final polish. I’m talking about realizing it makes no sense to have someone discuss this side subject, or to give someone more screen time than I did because I like their voice. The cut of the BBS Documentary episode “Make it Pay” was one hour and five minutes when I beta premiered it. The final cut was about 43 minutes. There’s a lot of changes that will happen.

This movie will be good or it will not be good, but it will be mine and the choices I make over the next few months will be radical. Just because I know this is the case doesn’t mean I can’t do the foundation work properly. Stuff that might never be used, words that might never see the final cut…. it’s all part of this process.

More on this as it comes to me.

While not required to jump on his sword like my boss Brian, Patrick O’Malley was definitely up there, a close second to Brian in all he did for me.

By the time Brian hired me, he did so when I was 29, a veteran of hosting computers and UNIX and a bunch of other technical details. He found me communicative and engaging, and hired me without a second round of interviewing. The reason he had such a person to hire was because of Pat.

There’s a whole book in my time in the videogame industry (all two years of it) and that’s coming down the pike. In fact, that’s kind of the reason I started this weblog to begin with, to get my skills and chops up in writing so I can do that subject justice. But for the sake of explaining Pat, let’s leave me right at the end of my videogame life. I was 27, basically broke, thousands of dollars in debt, and months had passed since I’d seen a paycheck. Desperate, I knew it was time to move on, so I went to, of all things, the Usenet Newsgroup ne.jobs (New England Jobs) and searched for “UNIX” and “$”. Three places had a phone number. Pat picked up the phone when I called, and when I said I wanted to send a resume, and I still remember this so many years later, he said:

“So, tell me on the phone in the next two minutes why I should hire you.”

I stumbled along, on the spot, and then he told me to come down to Medford, Massachusetts, where the datacenter was, and do an interview. At this interview, he gave me a discussion of RAID, the use-of-multiple-drives-for-redundant-protection approach to storage, and then asked me to do some research on the subject and come back with some answers. I left and spent a week on it, and then came back. Now, interestingly enough, my resultant answers were wrong; I missed a basic fact and came to the wrong conclusions. But that wasn’t what Pat was interested in. He was interested in the fact that I’d wanted the job badly enough to do the work of researching, compose a report, and then come back in a week to present my conclusions. By the time I’d come back, I was well on my way to really understanding RAID (Pat loved RAID, it turned out) and he saw potential in this. Plus, I was not a freak.

Pat hired me for a 30 day trial as a consultant. He liked doing this and explained why (Pat could always explain his actions). Pay a nice fat consultant’s fee, make some good cash, and if at the end of 30 days you don’t fit in, well, at least you have a fat sack of mad cash. And I remember this month, too, because it turned out I was working 60 hour weeks or greater. At $50 an hour. In other words, I went from a job where I saw a total of $9,000 the previous year (because of the missed paychecks by the videogame company) to making $3,000+ a week. By the time my month of consulting was up, I’d paid off all my debts, every single one. I’d gone from a broke, burnt out lost soul to a completely healthy one. It was cathartic.

Pat had a number of interesting management approaches and philosophies. I got them either directly or indirectly, and they might not work for everyone, but I think it speaks to his character.

• He hated freaks. By freaks, I mean people who were unbelievably talented in some field but utterly incapable of getting along with other human beings. If they acted weird, made strange declarations and pre-conditions for doing basic tasks, or were, basically, someone he couldn’t feel comfortable bringing in front of a customer, he didn’t want them. Part of that 30-day trial period was to see if you were a freak. He wanted friendly, smart, knowledgeable people who weren’t afraid to dumb down a subject to get the point across but could ramp back up in seconds if they turned around and faced another engineering type. All of his people were capable of this or they weren’t his people.
• When you gave an estimate on the time to do a task for a customer, he doubled it.
• He defended his group to the death. This meant he got a lot of hate from other departments. I could see how this would cause trouble for the company and is a classic example of warring factions, but he was our manager and it was about us. He said multiple times across the years, “if someone from above tells me to let one of my people go just to save money or to make a point, I leave first”. Claiming one of Pat’s people had done you wrong or was incompetent got Pat’s sights on you, and you found yourself in a pail with a shark and wearing meat sweatpants.

To say Pat’s sense of humor was biting is being coy. Stinging… surgical… a precision bombing campaign of gritted-teeth intensity’s a little more like it. If you watch my speeches, I will suddenly lay out a whopper of a line. Trust that to Pat. I soaked up his style like a sponge and it never went away. And this switchblade joke style made it so I still remember them, years on. I recall, for example, an argument with a vendor over downtime; the vendor wanted it on one day, Pat wanted it another. He looked over at me, smiled, and then said into the phone “Y’know, if you go out and speak to 100 guys in the industry, 99 of them are going to agree with me… and the other one will be you.“

The world of YouTube has provided a quick and easy was to see Pat in action. Here he’s talking about something as simple as SMS (text messaging on mobile devices) and you can find, I hope, some of the roots of my own speaking style and approach to audiences in how he presents himself.

I must state again: this man quintupled my salary, on a hunch I’d do him right. He shot me up multiple tax brackets because I thought I was worth the risk. I hope I was. After Pat left the company, he occasionally called me up to help with a job or consulting project he was on, another one of the tools in his pocket as he did different work. His first love is teaching, but teaching pays ass, and so he goes between technology work and education. (He spent years as a trainer, if that isn’t evident).

We had years together, as a company’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, and we handled crises, triumphs and tragedies as needed. He could nail a situation in moments and give us the plan, or he could step back and let us do the work, just making sure it got done. He was, truly, one of my best bosses.

If he calls me and needs me, I’m already halfway there.

I was lucky enough to have a little dinner with old co-employees last night, and it reminded me to put my thoughts down about a few of my best bosses. I’m going to start with Brian, because his actions are particularly memorable.

Here’s what Brian looks like nowadays.

He used to have no goatee but otherwise looked the same when he hired me in 2000 at HarvardNet. He was always a smiler, a little rotund, small eyes behind thick glasses, and you liked the guy immediately. In seconds you liked Brian, and in minutes you adored him. He’s just one of those types of people. Luckily, he was also a guy worth liking so much.

Brian was the lead of the engineers, the sad and shivering techies who handled all sorts of infrastructure and server maintenance for HarvardNet. There were about 5 of us, occasionally 6, with some of us doing UNIX and some of us doing Windows and all of us getting whatever crazy problems were coming down the pike. Some of our job was handling new issues (a server is down, DNS needs fixing, news server is filling) and others were old issues (9,000 customers are using a single box and we should upgrade it, it turns out that credit card numbers are being sent in the open via e-mail to the billing department).

Now, about myself. I’d been working for another company (and my other best boss, Patrick, who I’ll chat about momentarily) and when Pat was gone and things were looking dim, I hopped over to HarvardNet with another UNIX admin, who himself actually had jumped over and up into the role of System Architect. So I was under 30, the veteran of adminning hundreds of machines, and excited at my new salary and a growing company. So I was a primed pump, really.

My time at HarvardNet needs more than a simple entry, so I will not fill your life with dozens of paragraphs of that experience. Yet.

A classic situation that I still keep close to my stories chest was when the CEO of the company walked down the aisle of engineers we inhabited, and discovered that it was empty, at 11am, when we started to file in. We worked late as a rule so we came in late as well. This was, of course, unacceptable. He translated his displeasure to Brian, and when I say translated, I mean he issued a command in a mumbly fashion, which was his general approach. Brian, therefore, had to write us an e-mail that said “All admins must be in at 9am and stay until 5pm”.

The next day we all showed up, at noon.

Brian sent out an e-mail that said “OK, you win.” And we then started showing up from 10-11am dependably. It all worked out.

So, why do I like Brian so much? Two situations, specifically.

First, HarvardNet had a real money-winning strategy. We would charge for backups, and then not back things up.

This sounds kind of fraudulent, doesn’t it. Well, it was. We certainly had people working on the problem (including my old co-worker the Systems Architect) but we in fact had not gotten a working backup system in place. So in fact, we had many companies hosting with us with absolutely no backing up of their data happening. For months. Months and months and months. We took the money for this service, of course, but we never actually backed anything up. Imagine the profit margin on that approach. I’m sure I just shot the eyebrows of a few ex-HarvardNet customers to the roof, but hey, bodies are buried everywhere, friends.

So, occasionally, a customer would want to use the backup they were paying for and recover the data. And of course, we didn’t have this. It would normally end in, you know, a lawsuit. At least, it would in a normal world. But this was the technical world of the late 1990s and selling people things you didn’t actually have was de facto a-OK business practice, apparently. Sales certainly had no problem selling customers this backup service, so by the time it came down to the engineers, it was not a case of “make that backup system we sold” (that was being done, slowly, by another group), but it was a case of “provide support for the issue that we do not actually have the thing the customer thinks we do”.

Now, the Jason of this time was a coward. Oh, I admit it. Coward coward coward. The reckoning, the idea of going full-face into a situation where I knew our company had fucked up, that good people (or maybe just people) had been screwed by the company’s lying and incompetency, that I knew we were in the wrong…. well, that just about froze me solid with terror. I couldn’t imagine going into a call with a customer wondering why they had no copy of their old website or user data or anything, that it wasn’t so much “gone” as “was never there”… I couldn’t begin to fathom making that phone call to explain this.

Brian, however, did it. Brian, who would have to get up at 5am every single morning to drive into work from a long way away, who was there long after others sneaked off, and then drive back all that way, almost every day. Brian, who was the one who took the heat for his people’s schennanigans (and we were masters of schennanigans), and had to translate this displeasure to us as best he could. Brian, who worked so very hard to do the company right, had, at the end of the day, the duty of making the call to the customer to explain there was no backup to get to them.

The customers, of course, would scream. We use the term “scream” too much in office culture; it implies “this was very important” and dismisses situations where the customers would actually scream. These customers would actually scream. Brian’s cube was across from mine, so I could hear him trying to calm down actual screaming customers who had lost their data. He would take the brunt of this shit-ball and would offer them something from a small pocket of tools the company provided. A few free months of service, perhaps, or an upgrade in some aspect of the hosting situation. This would mollify some. Others would declare themselves no longer customers, that they were done. In the grand scheme of things, these phone calls happened less than a half-dozen times, but when they happened, it was memorable. Brian did this, this unbelievably brave (to me) thing, and would be the one to always do it. I was always impressed by that.

And like a bad plane experience or a near-miss on the highway, we would resolve to fix this no-backups issue, but it was never really solved during my tenure.

Ah, yes, my tenure. Because of this and other reasons, and presented with the possibility that my old job wanted me back for a lot more money than they’d paid me, than even HarvardNet was paying me, meant I ultimately left the firm and went back there, leaving poor Brian and others behind. The parting with Brian and the others was amicable, perhaps less so with the company.

So, at some point I put up a “harvardnetsucks.com” site. In fact, it’s still around and badly in need of some transfer to a memorial/static site. Now, a company that had such a site put up about them could respond in several ways.

HarvardNet decided to sue me. The whole sordid story is elsewhere, but just to be clear: the lawsuit was frivolous, intended to scare me into not running a critical site about a company. They sued me for $125,000 for indicating I’d gotten a lot of hits from a specific IP address and that one day it stopped and I got e-mails from the employees of HarvardNet that my site was done when it wasn’t. I then announced that they’d likely shut me off at the firewall. Again, $125,000.

So while this battle was being raged, a battle that cost $20,000 to fight, there came a time that my lawyer needed testimony from people in a motion to have the lawsuit thrown out. We had an expert on firewalls (when you show the IP of a firewall, it doesn’t automatically stop working! Also, it doesn’t cost $40,000 to replace one, as HarvardNet claimed).

But we also had Brian.

Brian testified, in court, that the company had misrepresented the situation in the lawsuit. That they were lying, specifically. That they were making up this charge to harass me, and that the lawsuit was intended to threaten me into silence.

Brian’s wife was pregnant. Brian was working for the company. Brian had two young daughters and a home with a mortgage. And yet he still stood up to the plate and testified for me, an ex-employee who’d moved onto another job, because it was the right thing to do. Naturally, he was fired on the spot when this was done in court. He came back to work and there was a meeting and he was fired.

Make no mistake, he did the right thing; he didn’t lie about my situation, and he told the truth of what was going on. But how little do we as a species do the “right thing”, especially when it’ll put our family and home at excessive risk? Who of many of us would answer that phone and do this? So Brian is a jewel in the darkness, and always will be, to me. One of my best bosses.

And this bravery has, I hoped, rubbed off on me. Life and work have presented me with situations, ones where I know there is no good outcome for myself. Times when I know that when I pick up that phone or walk into that room or meet that person, it is going to be a biblically-proportioned shit storm, raining on me with no hope of recourse or escape. In the pre-2000 era, I would likely beg off, run away, find some excuse to not be there and be unavailable. I’d be a coward, plain and simple. The urge is back there, sometimes, when I know things will be particularly bad, and I almost mull a plan of escape.

And then I remember Brian, and it becomes all too easy.