You are either a fan of my presentations I’ve given over the years or you are not. I am not here to dissuade you in either direction. But I figured that since a lot of people think presentations are “magic” or otherwise a talent they are utterly incapable of, and because I happen to have a nice artifact lying around, I’d talk a little about my process.

I gave a talk last August at DEFCON, called “The Edge of Forever: Saving Computer History”. The entire presentation is located on Google Video, and is about an hour and a half. Here it is in a window:

If you were to have attended DEFCON last year and looked at the program, you would have found this description of the talk, written by me:

THE EDGE OF FOREVER – MAKING COMPUTER HISTORY, by Jason Scott, TEXTFILES.COM
Too often, “Computer History” gets shoved into a forgotten bin of irrelevancy, devoid of use for lessons and understanding. Even more often, people often fail to realize they’re making history themselves. Jason Scott will walk though the basics of computer history, what to save, how to ensure things last for future generations, or perhaps how to ensure it’s never found again.

Very general, and it was intentionally so, because I was leaving it open until the last possible moments to nail down specific details about the talk. I know computer history and I know about archiving (although my cousin would be quick to point out that I am not familiar with all the library science and archiving terms for doing so). The DEFCON call for papers happens a few months in advance (the starting date for submitting talks this year is March 1st, for example, with it closing on May 15th, for an August conference) so I knew things might shift between close and the conference.

In a case like this, I am relying rather strongly on two aspects to get my talk/presentation accepted. One is my reputation, that is, I actually show up and give the talk and it’s actually a talk, and the second is the relative obscurity/uniqueness of my topics. If you look at the list of speakers for DEFCON 15, there’s only a few in the same space: the UFO talk by Richard Thieme (which was an absolutely lovely historical talk and editorial perspective, and is available here), and Self-Publishing and the Computer Underground, which had several historical and historical-minded figures on the panel (and who I count as friends). That second talk is here.

As a result, my sort of talk is somewhat of use to a situation like DEFCON, where the talks are rather heavy with discussions of exploits, malware, and security. Security, in fact, dominates DEFCON as it does in a lot of other conferences, ostensibly because it packs them in. I don’t actually attend security talks all that often, because there’s nothing in them for me. I’m sure for people choosing talks, they look around for a little spice, and they know I will at least show up and give a cohesive work, so I get chosen.

There are two talk types I give, which I organize internally: narrative, and fact-filled. Narratives are talks where I have a story arc and move through the arc through the given time. The majority of my talks work this way. The others are fact recitations, which I enjoy less but which have more hard information for the benefit of the audience that wants this. I’ve probably given less than a half-dozen of these, whereas I’ve given probably two dozen talks of the narrative stripe over the years.

When I work on a talk, I try to understand what audience I’m working with. It helps if I’ve been to the conference before, because then I can recall the sort of folks and the sort of venue I was dealing with. If I haven’t, I try and listen to any talks or presentations given before and gauge the audience reaction, looking for what was liked the most. I am a very huge fan of racking back as far as possible and trying to understand the greater context of the talk I’m going to give and where I’m giving it. It is one thing to give a presentation before a slightly buzzed or loose audience and another to give one to an audience who feels they owe their employers maximum attendance and are therefore going to every talk they can fit in and I happened to fit in. The emotions are different, the reactions are different.

For my fact-filled talks, I will have a whole sheet of researched stuff. If I need to know the exact date of something, the populations of organizations, the exact names of people, then I have all this planning to do and research to do. I don’t enjoy these because they’re essentially book reports, but the alternative is making up facts and I won’t do that either. Ultimately, though, the fact-filled talks simply have more rigorous pre-planned flow notes, done weeks or months before my presentation. This is OK because I choose subjects not beholden to dynamic forces that will have an effect over that time.

The day or sometimes within the hour of my talk, I will assemble a flowchart for myself to keep myself in check, and to make sure that in the heat of talking I don’t skip an important point. What prompted this weblog entry was that we happen to have at ready hand both my video performance (available above) and the actual notes I wrote for myself two hours before my presentation. Here they are:

(Sorry for the photos instead of flat images; my scanner’s on a spiritual journey at the moment.)

Watching the talk and then browsing along with the notes I have in front of me will likely pull some of the magician’s trickery out from your eyes. What might look like I’m musing about where to go next is in fact me glancing over the page and deciding if I need to go further down the current line or jump over to the next big idea. Some of my notes are utterly incomprehensible, little codes I say to myself to provide touchstones. AUDIENCE SCAN is my note to do what I often do now, ask people where they heard of me or any projects I’m up to. The LOD in a little circle means “start that story of hackers and history, which includes the Legion of Doom as mentioned in Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling”. Not intuitively obvious, I guess.

I found out just before this talk that there was nobody scheduled after me. I then decided that it would be cool to have optional longer stories and shove them in the middle of the talk. This is how I bloated a 50 minute talk to an hour and a half. There’s three stories in there (Amish, ARC-ZIP, Aleshe) that are utterly optional. This is why they’re all grouped together in the notes. “Should you decide to, here are more quills in your quiver. Otherwise, skip.”

Some stuff, I hear at the same time as the audience. The story of the Saved By The Bell collection is, for example, composed on the spot (the story is true but it’s not mentioned on my notes). My reaction of “It’s a constant maintenance nightmare!” is improv. A lot is improv. The key is to move on, listen to how the audience breathes, see how they are, and realize you have to keep moving if you’re not grabbing them.

Some people might find it terrifying that three and a half hotel-notepad-sized sheets of paper are all that stand between me and an hour and a half of speaking. I don’t find it terrifying at all, but maybe it’s because I really know that given the need, I can jump off into any old subject and hold forth. The narrative structure might suffer, but at least I can pull something out that would be amusing.

Anyway, here’s hoping something in here gives you insight to my approach.

I saw the movie Jumper last weekend with a few family members. I enjoyed the movie immensely, but for entirely wrong reasons. I am not recommending it for you unless these reasons have meaning to you as well.

Jumper’s plot is simplistic by even high-concept standards, so I will provide it for you in a few simple sentences: An abused boy whose mother left him at 4 discovers in high school he can teleport short and long distances. He leaves his town and runs roughshod on the world for seven years, until he finds out there are people who can stop him from doing so and possibly kill him. He goes home and picks up an old girlfriend, gets into a fight with another jumper, and ultimately finds out his mom works for the people who are trying to kill him, which is why she left. He is victorious until the sequel.

Most of the movie is, therefore, exotic shots of locales he teleports to, fights he engages with another jumper or the people trying to kill him, and short conversations he has with people before doing one of the other two activities. It is truly and utterly soulless.

It is entertaining, though, in that way that watching a basic acrobatic act is entertaining; people come out, they do the trick, they move on. Eventually, someone changes up a trick so you go “woo” and then you’re back on the track for the next trick. But sometimes you get surprised and you’re basically more entertained than if you stared at a brick wall for an hour.

This review probably sounds cynical. I don’t entirely mean it to be. But why do I enjoy this film?

Simply put, it is just the kind of film I designed in my head when I was a teenager.

You have a lot of spare time as a teenager, or, more accurately, you are often put in a position of powerlessness as a teenager meaning you have to wait around a lot or you’re unable to make the most of your time. People tell you where to go or not go and what you’re allowed to think about and while it’s not entirely successful, it can be rather oppressive sometimes.

I loved movies so I would often make movies in my head. However, they were not very good movies. I’d have some basic ideas or a neat little trick, and then I’d construct this film in my head (which I thought was fantastic) and when I walked around the various towns I lived in, I could imagine them as locations or what I’d want to capture in the film and so on. It’s one of those time-passing things you do.

Looking back, of course, these movies are often quite shallow. A kid who is suspiciously like me gets some crazy power and he shows everybody up. Over and over. Until the movie ends. This is basically the plot of Jumper. Even the name, Jumper. You might as well call it Teenage Power Trip Movie with Samuel Jackson. Did I mention Samuel Jackson is in it? He is. He has white hair and he’s the “bad guy”, sort of, although you have to admit, watching it, his character kind of has a point.

Actually, looking at the movie from almost any angle but the central character’s self-centered point of view is a somewhat unhappy exercise, because then you realize nearly every other character is betrayed, mistreated or punished, often for no good reason. Alcoholic dad has his son run away one day, is really sad about this, cleans himself up a bit, thinks he hears his son nearby seven years later, comes in and finds he isn’t there, then is killed. Pretty sad, really. Dad was a bit messed up and he then gets killed. He doesn’t even find out why his wife left him, which was basically to avoid killing her own son.

But I am overthinking that aspect of things. Thinking of how Jumper came about, it’s as if I was given a nice office on the movie lot, and asked to make a film, and then some nice people worked out the logistics, and I was so happy someone was finally paying attention to me, that I let them make a few changes to make it easier to film. I wonder if, somewhere down the line in the production, there really was a twelve year old calling the shots. I know it’s based on a book, so I guess I’ll pick that up and see how it reads.

Either way, it was kind of fun to see this movie from this perspective. I can’t imagine it being a lot of fun from others, though.

I can’t wait for the sequel, in which people teleport a lot and fight.

Hi, filmmaker. I hope you found this weblog entry in the dark depths of your film production, when you’re desperately begging someone for the rights to some music, or when you’re stressing over whether to include that sequence with that really funny girl, even though you think it runs long. My advice: cut it and make it bonus footage. You can thank me later and your audience will thank me a thousand times over. Anyway, filmmaker, let’s chat.

Because search engines are weird, you maybe found this weblog entry because you searched for How to Subtitle Your Movie, Subtitle Software for DVD, Oh My God This Rave Is Amazing, or Sure-fire Techniques for Selling Your Film to Festivals. These last two don’t apply to what I’m going to talk about in this weblog entry, but you’re here now and you better goddamn sit down anyway. You sat through who knows how many paragraphs of how-to sites and speeches while making your movie, so what’s one more.

Filmmaker, I know the difficulties you’ve encountered, believe me. I remember when I made one of my student films and I slept overnight on the floor of one of the sets, using a bookbag as a pillow and the fetid air as my only blanket. I am not even lying to you, filmmaker, this happened. I also worked on a production where we made the two nice actors who were supposed to play brother and sister suddenly play lovers and we made those nice actors get it on in a couch in a registrar’s office at a college that looked sort of like a dining room. So I know uncomfortable and the itchiness of lying to actors and standing around while sin happens. I am your friend, filmmaker.

So filmmaker, take my hard-won advice and subtitle your fucking movie.

I have popped in so many DVDs over the last few years, filmmaker… so very many. I have watched films on skateboarding, on making zines, on live action role playing, on videogames and board games and word games and something called the Lesbian Film Festival because the chicks looked hot. I have sat through films on fonts, on throat singing, even on people who love watching movies. Think about that, filmmaker… I have watched a movie about people who watch movies. That’s how many movies I’ve watched; I’ve come out the other side and am now part of the movies being watched. That’s meta-, filmmaker. You know what meta is.

And through these films, I tolerate a lot of bullshit. Maybe you got a shot that’s really pretty but anyone with a brain cell would wonder what it’s doing in here. I’ve seen shots where it looks like the camera was strapped to the back of a great dane high on ketamine. I watched a documentary where the subjects had to hold their own shitty mikes, filmmaker, making the whole thing look like some hellish version of Bowling for Dollars. But I tolerated them, just like people will tolerate your little movie and all the mistakes you made.

But please, filmmaker, subtitle your fucking movie.

I know you hate the deaf. A lot of people can’t tolerate the deaf; they can’t hear you, after all, and you love the sound of your own voice. Someone who can’t hear this magnificent instrument is fucked up, filmmaker, and they will never know the true joy of you. But subtitles are the next best thing; not every shot is so obvious with the sound turned off that you can know what’s going on. People sometimes speak off-camera. And get this, filmmaker… some people just don’t talk all that good. Even more importantly, deaf-hating filmmaker, there are even better reasons to subtitle your movie:

• Some people answer the phone while your film is playing and that makes it easier for them to keep track of what’s going on. Yes, it’s a blasphemy that someone is going to do this during your magnificent film, but that’s what’s going to happen, and you might as well come to terms with it.
• Some people have kids and so they leave the thing muted so the kids don’t hear the bad words. You know what kids are, filmmaker? They’re time sinks that smear peanut butter on your good stuff. If you curse at or near them the government takes them away, which isn’t so bad but then you miss them after a while.
• Some people can hear but not so well, filmmaker. Isn’t that weird? But these folks have trouble with overlapping dialogue or weird audio effects on voices or echoes or any of a bunch of other stuff that you thought made your film better. They need help, and subtitles help.

There are many more reasons, filmmaker, so don’t worry that you’re giving into the deaf’s terrorist demands. People who can hear like you can will want to have subtitles too.

Subtitling films is easy, filmmaker. Considering what you had to do to convince that restaurant you could shoot there after hours, or what you had to sell out of your family’s assets to buy a nice camera, this will be a piece of cake. It’s so easy you could subtitle a feature film in a single day. Think of it; a complete new audience and a great feature added to this film you slaved over for weeks, with just an added day of work. It’s so simple, interns could do it. You’ll want to let it sit for a day or two afterwards and proofread it of course, but you know about going that extra mile, filmmaker; that restaurant owner had horrible breath and he kissed you like a drunk sailor. Subtitling is easy.

There’s this program called subtitle workshop, filmmaker. I know you don’t read very well, which explains that stilted dialogue in your love scene, so let’s make those letters nice and big:

GET SUBTITLE WORKSHOP.

It’s free, filmmaker. You love free. Free is what you’ve been mainlining the whole way through your film. When you talked about how great it would be and how hard you were working on your film, you were probably getting a free coffee from your buddy or an understanding person who was worried about the poor filmmaker. A lot of people are worried about you, filmmaker, as I am. So when I say this program is free, I mean it. It’s free and free. A popup will happen because those people are probably starving because filmmakers are taking their program for free, but you know how to kill a popup, I know you do. After all, you killed your gag reflex hanging out with the kind of people who hang out near people who make films but don’t make films themselves. You can do it, filmmaker. I know you can.

Hell, you probably have a Mac, filmmaker, because all filmmakers have Macs instead of me. Maybe you edit on Linux only. That’s just awesome, in a way that watching a house burning down the street is awesome. You can now, in the back of your mind, consider ignoring my advice, but I tell you that they make free subtitling software for your machine too, latte-sipping filmmaker, and you can find it in no time. But I use Subtitle Workshop and it works with almost any format of movie, and can output the subtitles dozens of ways. It works for me, and it’ll work for you.

Subtitle workshop is very easy to use, filmmaker. I learned it in no time, and subtitled 7 hours of film. I subtitled bonus material, introductory material, and all the actual films. I even added subtitle tracks on top of other subtitle tracks! One of my episodes has a bunch of people in it, too many to put their names under. So I made a subtitle track with their names on it, so you could watch the movie and see who was talking. Isn’t that slick, filmmaker? I did that. And you can do it too and claim it was your idea, just like you think it was your idea to have the murderer be the priest. Whoops.

Filmmaker, I haven’t wanted to insult you through this, but it’s hard not to. You somehow got all this way, before finding my weblog entry, thinking that subtitling is unnecessary or hard. It is neither, filmmaker, and now that you know the secret of subtitle workshop you can go ahead and subtitle your film, or do that special thing you do to make some poor sap do it for you.

I love you, filmmaker, like all those people you meet in the film industry love you.

Subtitle your fucking movie.

While I registered the domain name in 2002, production in earnest of GET LAMP started in October of 2005. It is now February of 2008. Assume for fun that it will take into the summer to finish this, which is starting to look cheery and optimistic. This means it will have taken three years to make this film. The previous film, BBS Documentary, was started in October of 2001 and started showing up in homes in May of 2005. That’s about four years.

I assume the arcade documentary, when that rolls around in earnest, will be at this same rate, 2-4 years. At that point I’ll be in my 40s.

Cleaving things like this, I end up thinking I’ve probably got five movies in me. One’s finished, one is almost done. One is planned and somewhat in production. That leaves probably two I don’t know about yet.

This is me assuming that by the time I’m about 50 I won’t want to be making this films. Considering how unpredictable life is, I could be quite wrong and I’ll drop dead in between interviews when I’m 70. Or maybe this one is the last one I’ll ever finish. I don’t know, after all.

Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to ponder, every once in a while, what those two movies would be. I look at the vectors of other documentary guys and how they transitioned over time, and I am concerned I will end up with a dreary political film of some sort, trying to “do something” with my documentary skills to get a “message” out there. Here’s hoping I don’t do that.

Or I could move into fictional filmmaking. Like a guy who’s tasted the thrill of building his own engine who then rents a car, it just doesn’t seem like it’d be as much fun. But others have done it to great success and even seemed to enjoy themselves. I couldn’t see myself wandering the hallways in LA trying to get it made, though; LA is where I visit my buddies who live out there, and I never set foot in any of the “stuff”. In fact, I made it a point to bittorrent under the Hollywood sign.

Oh, speaking of bad investments, actually… that trip to Hollywood was part of something called the DeviantArt Summit, an event held in this beautiful theater that had been around forever. We got in essentially free because of RaD Man’s connections; we thought we’d make major bank on the whole thing, so we invested in this really swank setup for selling my documentary and some ACiD related material. I think I paid $600 for the machine rental and the big BBS Documentary poster, and of course flight and hotel. I sold two copies. Two. But here’s where you have to take in the whole value of things, because I got to meet Michael Robertson of MP3.COM fame (gave him a copy), Bruce Sterling (gave HIM a copy), verified the real story of Sonique, stayed at the amazing Roosevelt Hotel, ate at some fine fine restaurants, drove over and hung out with Tom Jennings to get him his copies of the documentary, and generally had an amazing time. So do we judge the “value” by the sales or what happened? I go by what happened.

I’m at no loss of suggestions of films I should do; many of them are along the line of “Usenet” or “Internet Culture” or “Slashdot”. I could see “Usenet” but even that’d be a little much for me, and it doesn’t make my heart and head burn. That heartburn is where the energy comes to see something to the end. Every day I work on my little text adventure documentary, I am full of pure glee. Months of research and travel and work and I still thrill at it; I don’t know many subjects besides arcades that will have this effect.

I don’t spend too much time considering those mystery films or what my film career will do or where it goes; I’m just happy that after making my dad drop eighty grand into my college education for film, I actually made back that 80 grand doing film. That’s got to count for something.

And the best part: When I’m done with these five movies, people will look at my IMDB entry and go “Wow, he didn’t do much of anything.”

I had a new record rather recently: someone decided to download textfiles.com through 100 simultaneous connections.

I have to be clear that I don’t mean 100 files downloaded or they connected to me 100 times in some period of time; I mean that they maintained 100 separate connections to my server and had them going full bore for hours. They were obviously on some sort of connection not unlike the satellite-death-ray at the end of Akira; the pipe that textfiles.com rests on had been dropped to emulate an acoustic coupler running during a GWAR concert.

How many leeches can dance on the end of a pipe is a question that’s been considered for decades; the guys who take and don’t give, what they are in the scheme of things. Personally, I consider them vital links in the chain, people willing to be distribution points across time and distance, even if their collections don’t make it out into the general pool for some time. When I collect piles of disk images from 1980s era 8-bit home computers, I know full well these are the products of man-years of gimmie-gimmie downloads, someone hooked to a BBS overnight and cleaning them out.

In this case, however, the folks involved are trying to acquire the data through insane means and literally ruining it for everybody. I now use the textfiles.com server for other projects, not because I don’t have servers locally that could do the work, but so I can feel the heartbeat of the connection over the day.

Good thing I have a Defibrillator handy.

This Defibrillation device comes in the form of a script, which I call OINK. Here it is:

#!/bin/sh
#
# OINK OINK
for oink in `netstat -an | grep ESTAB | cut -f5-8 -d"." | grep ^80 | cut -c11- | sort -u`
do
ponk=`netstat -an | grep ESTAB | grep $oink | wc -l`
if [ "$pork" -gt "5" ]
then
echo "$pork     $oink"
fi
done

Oink will tell me of anyone who has more than 5 connections. It doesn’t DO anything; I have to do whatever I feel necessary, which shifts over time. Currently I just do a software firewall and block people completely. I could put something into the webserver software, but that’s making apache do all sorts of work it doesn’t need to; better to just forget Mr. Multiconnect ever existed for a while.

What makes this effort worth it are the letters. Oh yes, the delicious, luxurious letters I get from people who slowly, methodically determine that textfiles.com is in fact up, but they are in fact down. Oh, the positions, the promises, the junkie trying to plead his case while you notice all the furniture is missing. It’s a great thing.

And it takes very little bandwidth!

In my pile of incoming documentaries and DVDs to watch, I seem to have stumbled onto a new level of scant packaging. I ordered a copy of “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox”, a documentary about Dr. Bronner. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s fine; that’s the whole point of a documentary, to be about something you don’t already know cold and bring you into that world, if possible. Short form, Dr. Bronner was a holocaust survivor who made a soap and beauty products company and put crazy-go-nuts messages on the label. I especially like the completeness of Cecil’s overview of the subject.

This is the sum total of what showed up in my mailbox:

Sara Lamm seems a nice enough kid from her various interviews she’s given in support of this film. And as far as cross-product promotion goes, you have to hand it to her for having a situation where you can actually buy the documentary with some soap from the soap company.

But wow! A piece of cardboard and a disc!

Kudos for making the DVD Region 0 (this means it can be played on any DVD player, anywhere in the world). At this point, the retardation of Region Encoding should be self-evident, but I’m going to say, good job there. Point to the production.

The menu system is enjoyable, the reference to “All One!” on the packaging was cute, and then there’s this ugly over-restrictive copyright line on the packaging declaring you can’t copy it or lend it to anybody, or play it in public. Wow! That sure brings me back to the good old days when people were worried there’d be illegal speakeasy movie theaters, or that someone would cut you out of your cash because they let someone down the hall at the dorm check out your movie. (Yes, I realize “unauthorized lending” likely refers to a library; but that makes it better how?)

I’m positive they threw that bit of yuck on the packaging because it’s always been done that way and it’s a pleasant expected out of date decoration, like the little cornices on the tops of buildings. It’s cute, it’s familiar, it takes you back.

But then, the more I sat there cranked at how weak the packaging is, I started to think about it.

Why am I so fucked up about this?

I mean, it’s only packaging, right? It’s about the movie, the quality of the production, the stuff on the DVD that you get, and that it all got to me at my house safely. Surely, if the packaging is efficient and made of delightful cardboard that’s probably recycled (although the text doesn’t crow about this, which makes me suspicious), then everything’s howdy-dory, right? Why don’t I shut up and enjoy my fuckin’ movie?

In my case, I don’t feel like I was particularly rewarded for buying this. I got punched on when my movie sold for $50, and this one sells for $25. There’s nothing to recommend buying it to get the package. You might as well rent it. And if you rent it, by the way, I think you’re violating the cute little text cornice on the back. But really, if you were renting it you’d just get the little DVD and you’d have gotten well over 60% of the total weight and experience of the original package!

I feel like there’s some serious not-getting-it going on here.

Similarly, I get that ooky feeling reading about the release of AJ Schnack’s new documentary out on DVD. He and I run in very different circles (although we were in the same room once!) and so I can hardly speak for him and act like we’re close buddies or anything. But there’s this sense of distance from his own DVD that bothers me, like it happened “over there” and now it’s finished and there we go. I’m trying to imagine having that level of separation from my projects and I can’t do it. And I’d be on my weblog (AJ started his as support for his newest documentary) yammering off about the technical specs, the process of fitting stuff and what worked and didn’t work. Just serving as a warning to others on what not to do or what to avoid seems pretty cool. I bought a copy of his newest DVD, but I’m having the feeling I’m going to get another little package in the mail, one that doesn’t compliment the work within.

I think of the theatrical run as a little party, and the DVD packaging as a promise. It’s the final work, the total control of the created “product” that you are sending along to people. I’m starting to wonder if I’m totally off book with everybody else. Isn’t that where your work will have the most effect, in someone’s home, their special place where they watch these things? Or is it that critical that you know it’s in a huge commodified popcorn-stank sticky box on the outskirts of town, for a week or two?

This is a delightful salad of concepts, chopped up and presented for your perusal.

My buddy Chris and I have this running joke/theme going for the last months or so, where we send each other basic how-tos in each other’s field, his being writing and mine being filming. We also bump into a lot of how-tos in our own fields, just boppin’ around on the world wide web. A lot of them say the very same things, sometimes couched in humor, occasionally misstating them, and occasionally buying into ideas they themselves have obviously never tested. People often offer advice! It’s freely given and generally it doesn’t hurt to look them over. If you’re so unsure of yourself that someone giving you advice is a terrifying or despairing experience, you haven’t field-tested your methods enough. Don’t avoid work to hear advice, but don’t ignore advice because you think it’ll affect your work.

The upshot is we ping a lot of shit at each other.

So in my travels and thanks to Chris’ suggestions of places to check out, I’ve formulated this idea about creating “stuff” in the contemporary frame. I’ve been living this idea for years now, but I don’t articulate it often. I keep bumping into other people articulating it, so I figured it was my turn.

Robert Rodriguez got a bunch of fame because he shot his film Mariachi very cheaply, doing an unbelievably low ratio for shot footage and ending up with a flick that could rival a lot of low-budget Hollywood features. His secret was utterly abusing his crew/friends and instituting crazy risks and jumps towards making his film. It does not scale, but given what he was working with, it was very effective. Later, he’s gone on to make more films, notably shooting in digital format. In recent presentations about his digital work, Rodriguez mentions how he leaves the cameras running almost constantly during shooting, working stuff out with the actors and jamming the cameras all around to catch lots of stuff dynamically. In other words, his frugal footage style, this huge hallmark of his work, went right out the window at the first opportunity. Instead, he knew that digital footage is absolutely cheap and so he would just let stuff run constantly so he’d capture every last bit of his actors’ output – which itself is not cheap, so he was actually switching one overexploited scarce resource for another.

There’s a book I enjoyed reading called the DV Rebel’s Guide, which is done by one of the founders of an effects house. It’s a pleasant little read, although if you don’t edit on an Apple using Final Cut Pro with After Effects, his exacting technical walkthroughs aren’t overridingly useful to you. No mind; he often gives you advice that would work with an 8mm handheld film camera, so it’s worth browsing.

Specifically, he mentions how you are bursting, filled to the brim, really, with one resource that Hollywood just does not have: time. If you need to wait to the next rainfall for the best shot, you can. If you have to wait 3 months before that family vacation out west will enable you to get some good establishing vistas, fine. In one chapter, he mentions how a fire down the way from his home enabled him to round up his actors and shoot a scene out in front of the smoking building, giving a sense of realism to his film he could never afford. Shooting your film to take advantage of someone else’s terrible personal tragedy is morally reprehensible and I love it.

In these cases, you are looking at what you have at your disposal and exploiting it instead of bemoaning the lack of other advantages you don’t have. Winona Rider is not going to be 18 again and be the perfect girl for your role, and work for you for cheap. Another actress, however, one of many who would jump at an opportunity like what you want to work on, definitely will. You can’t shoot downtown and fire weapons. Shoot in a park and fire fake weapons and do sound effects later at your desktop.

This is all interesting but not where I am commenting today.

What has my interest is my theory that a lot of people get hung up on doing stuff because it was always done that way, and the way that their judgment works is that if they don’t do things in a similar fashion, they’re not valid. That’s a huge mouthful, and I think I can reduce it down to: stop doing unnecessary things. If the output of your effort has the same look, effect and result of doing it the old way, and a new way is easier, cheaper, or whatever, then do it the new way. There’s no shame in doing it the new way, and if someone is shaming you, they are lame and should go in a hole.

A concrete example. You can use a digital camera, of which there are ones so cheap they should come with a side of fries, and shoot stuff at a great resolution for animation. You click in a remote, which many come with, bind that camera in a tripod, and then shoot at a huge resolution that would be more at home on an HD screen than an iPod. And the feedback is instantaneous. You see right on the little screen that you’re shooting well, got the lighting right, got it in focus. There’s way to chop these little cameras so you can yank the pictures off as you go, too. Plug in the end of the USB camera, yank the newest shots you took, unplug, keep shooting. Why would you do this in 16mm film? Nostalgia? Because Will Vinton used to? Because that’s what your favorite animation was shot with? I shot that film I talked about earlier this month in 16mm. I would never, ever, ever do that again. There is no benefit. It is unnecessary.

It’s easy to focus on the small stuff and think you’re living with this philosophy. You used your buddy’s band for some music instead of paying insane rates for a similar-sounding band. You used a really good poem from the 18th century as a prologue instead of making one up. Not bad! But let’s take it out even further.

Why are people often making films as linear 1.3 hour narratives?

I mean, sometimes it makes sense to do this, but more frequently than not, you’re shooting the length because that’s what movie houses preferred/prefer to get more showings in a day. It’s a single piece because you can easily ship the film canisters around with numbers to indicate what reel should go when. Make no mistake, I find technical film aspects fascinating. I was even trained in some, but it is utterly unnecessary now. This was the genius of Pete Chvany, my college film mentor; his lessons still work for me even when the medium has completely changed. Good is good!

BBS Documentary was seven hours of content, 5.5 of that film episodes. There were another few hours of audio recordings too. GET LAMP may, in the aggregate, end up rivaling BBS Documentary for the amount of content you get within the final product. There’ll be a main “film” but I already know of three “featurettes” (really, shorter episodes) accompanying it. The work will exploit the DVD format for multi-angle, subtitles, menus, and interactivity. Why not? I’m already there, I’m already making this work available in DVD, there’s no reason not to.

I am not pursuing film festivals because I don’t see any point. I suppose I could prowl around a few with my film being shown and enjoy things that way, but there’s not an overriding reason for me to do so. Various events have asked me to show a film and accompany the showings. I will do that, since I get the benefits of travel and meeting people without looking at everyone I meet who has any success as a “get”. The medium of film festivals, that is, a meat market where you often pay money for the hope that some big names will find your film and watch it and give you a gabillion bucks, is not something I see being relevant for the things I do. GET LAMP has several rough goals that I hope happen:

• People who have never heard of text adventures will be interested in this film.
• People who make or play text adventures will feel good about the film.
• The final product will take the average person a week of effort (40 hours) to fully regard.
• That average person could just see just a small bit of that and still be satisfied.

None of these is particularly impossible; I am leveraging my obsessiveness and regard for the subject and not getting hung up on being just like a film I might have seen in the theater in the last week. We’re different things and we each can do what we do well enough; why waste our talents trying to be like the other?

An occasional surprise or insight has come out of my interviews for GET LAMP that’s unlikely to get the amount of depth it deserves in the final work. I could be wrong and it’ll be prominent, but let’s assume for today’s entry that this isn’t the case. I’d like to talk a little bit about feelies, but specifically, the Feelie that started it all, which appears to be Murder Off Miami.

To explain what I mean by “Feelies” in this context: Infocom packaging (and really, a bunch of other software packages of the 1980s era) came with additional knick-knacks wrapped in, accompanying the disk or cassette and the manual. Sometimes these knick-knacks were simply copy protection items, like a code wheel or a map with information you’d need to refer to to go far enough in the game. Other times, they were neat stuff that provided you with an additional dimension to the game. I’ve interviewed a lot of people who have said this was what set an Infocom game ahead of other similar products for them; you opened the box, and stuff fell out, and even before you played the game you were part of the game, if that makes sense.

There are exhaustive galleries of all the contents of the Infocom boxes; they range from plastic rocks to a map with pieces to Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (always opaque).

The term “Feelies” harkens back to the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which was his term for a movie which provided tactile feedback. In other words, it could be claimed that the Infocom games were providing tactile feedback in each game with stuff you could hold in your hand while playing. I should mention this term was not 100% beloved within Infocom, but it has persisted and everyone at least knows what you’re talking about.

And what else I found out was that nearly everyone I talked to who had something to do with Infocom’s feelies had owned or knew of this interesting property, Murder Off Miami, which had originally been published in… 1936.

1936! Of course, that’s not the edition that everyone owned at the time of the dawn of Infocom… they owned the 1979 re-issue, which did its best to recreate the original work. This was, in fact, an edition I owned myself, because my dad got it for his kids and we did our best to honestly solve the mystery within.

The “book” was basically a bound folio, with what seemed to be a massive sheaf of papers inside, including photos, maps, telegrams and even pieces of evidence like hair. You were basically being given the “case file” of a sensational murder case, and as you browsed through the writings and clues, you were to come to the conclusion of who committed the murder and why, and at the end you would open a sealed portion of the book to see if your answer was correct.

It’s very well done. Here’s some shots of the inside:

You might imagine the feeling, especially as a youth, opening this treasure trove of items to pick through, this pile of evidence towards a crime that might help you solve a case, and there’s really no narrative in the strictest sense. Stuff is happening and there’s dates, and some of the essays within this collection read like prefaces, but generally we’re talking a big non-linear story. Right at home, one might say, with the sort of interactivity the later computer games would display.

As an adult you would likely recognize this for what it is, a fulfillment nightmare. Trying to imagine how much it cost to put together this collection of oddly-shaped items, bound by a string, means you really get a sense for how out of this world this thing was. There are a variety of websites describing the process of putting this item together, this one being the best. You really understand what a monumental undertaking and risk this was.

I must also stress, this item is worth getting, still. You can go to Amazon and pick up a used copy elsewhere, and you can read this thing and it will still have the same punch, 70 years after its initial creation.

The impression I got from the Infocommies was that this book was a real eye-opener of what “could” be done in printing. While the industry moved from the baggie-and-disk approach and did some basic cardboard printing, Infocom shot ahead with their package design, including the Starcross saucer and the Suspended plastic mask, and all the feelies inside. And it all comes back to this odd little book and its 1970s reprinting.

I’ve been tapped to speak at ROFLcon.

ROFLcon’s one of those ideas that is either going to be a spectacular one of a kind event or a complete mess; either way it does promise to be utterly memorable. The premise is simple; assemble a bunch of “Internet Memes” and see what happens. Have some talks so there’s something to do. Tailor it in a pleasant academic cloth so sociologists and cultural anthropologists can get out of their boxes for some air, and make sure there’s adequate bathrooms.

The guest list reads like a laundry list of fads of the last few years, but more pressingly, includes some heavy hitters in the realm of online content generation, the first set of people making it their full-time primary source of income and outlet to be a website. Some of them are friends, other colleagues that have written about me or me about them or otherwise. Many, many are not. I am famous in some small sector of life; others here are famous too, in differing sizes and amounts. Pretty much all can buy groceries without being hassled, which is my metric for “comfortable celebrity”. Some discussion was underway for me to record some interviews with people, maybe chat with a few; I don’t know how realistic this will be but it’s possibly there. I would think endless cellphone snapshots wouldn’t do this assemblage justice.

My talk is called “Before the LOL” and will function as a historical context to Internet Memes. I’m sure it’ll be adored by some and questioned by others, but at least my concern I raised some time ago about history being regarded for this is being nicely addressed in my favorite way: “OK, Captain Fingerwag, YOU steer.”

ROFLcon descends to Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 25th and 26th. I predict it will be a hot ticket indeed.

This little gem got contributed to me this week: a recording of people screwing around on a phone conference in 1987, doing a little ditty called the Modem Man Rap. Here’s the 866k mp3 file.

I figured I’d transcribe the greatness for you.

All right, take it from the top…. the Modem Man Rap

Yo my name is Modem Man and I’m K-Kool
But some people think I’m one big fool
I hack out Sprint and ITT
Wherever I go I make calls for free

All the kids call my phreaky phone line
And get the new codes all the time
Here is an Allnet for you
It’s 5163452
Tell me if it works, cause I don’t know
‘Cause it was hacked out by the Toad

In case you haven’t heard the news
Magnus got busted he’s one dumb dude
He hacked out 90 codes from MCI
And knocking down the door came the FBI
They busted in his door the very next day
Took his crystal ball and his brand new Hayes
They got all his numbers and even his loops
So he jumped on the phone and called Zarniwoop!

Word man, word man, that was bad, word

My name is Style, and I am fine
So call me on the other line
Style, please get off the phone
So your little sister can call home
Please go use the other line
But don’t be long, it’s dinner time
Better yet, go clean your room
And don’t forget to use the broom
I’m going to unplug your BBS
If you don’t start cleaning up this mess

Listen guys, I got to jam
Dinner’s ready, and we’re having spam
Too bad, cuz I’m having a ball
I just love conference calls

I’ll repair the gaps and mistakes if the original contributor gives me corrections, or others help me out with them. I did my best.

Notably, this 1987 rap calls into question a whole discussion that I got yanked into recently over the origins of “woot”. Obviously this rapper uses “Woot” within the same context that many people online do 3-4 years later, even explicitly rhyming it with “loot”. I doubt this was the origin for it, but at least it brings another artifact to the table. An Update: I am wrong, and it’s been corrected to reflect that.

The rap, now twenty years old, mentions a few pieces of phreak/hack history worth noting. It mentions having an Allnet, which was one of the also-ran phone companies. I’m going to use a paragraph from elsewhere to describe it:

“One of the first independents out of the gate after the 1984 breakup of AT&T, Allnet Communication Services was once the fourth-largest long-distance provider in the US. The product of a merger between Chicago-based Allnet and Detroit-based Lexitel, Allnet stood apart from its competition by being the first major player to lease its network infrastructure rather than purchase soon-outdated equipment. While AT&T and MCI employed analog microwave (the hissy long-distance that we remember as kids), Allnet leased digital microwave and fiber from other players, resulting in clearer calls and more network flexibility. Despite this technical superiority, Allnet got dinged frequently on its customer service, which seemed to suffer from high turnover and low consistency. Allnet was acquired by Frontier Communications in 1995. ” [1]

By the way, the 10xxx code for Allnet was 10444. When the rapper mentions Allnet “codes”, what he means is you would call Allnet’s access numbers (because using a 10xxx number would bill the phone you calling from), and then you’d type in a numeric code to charge it to your account. This way, you could use your account to call from anywhere in the country…. and so could others!

Also notable is the use of “K-Kool”, which is well in use at this point in history, accompanying the still-in-vogue K-Rad as a tech slang term. However, nobody appears to still use the term “Got to jam” to mean “I have to leave now.”