A little funny story has come to a close and you’re going to benefit.

I’ve mentioned it before; when I was in college, I did the animation and art direction for a parody of Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, called Conspiracy Rock, about the Kennedy Assassination (done to the tune of “A Noun’s a Person, Place or Thing”).

It played on Comedy Central. It played at Sundance. And now you will get to see it for free.

 

 

Seriously, the weblog entry I wrote about it tells you more than you could ever want to know about this project. I’m in debt and thankful to the director, Scott Rosann, for making it available. Thanks, Scott.

Ah, it’s like Christmas, or maybe just like finding something broken downstairs. When a rush of people come to this site for the first time, perhaps because of a prominent posting or my causing trouble in other circles, the opinions arrive with them, variant and colorful. I find people with all sorts of opinions on the writing, and people with ready-baked positions on assumptions that I didn’t even recognize were assumptions. It’s refreshing, like a herd of buffalo going through your shower is refreshing.

So, buried among this flood of people, like clockwork, will be a sprinkling of people who will let me know their opinion on my aesthetics. Or, to be more succinct:

WHY THE FUCK IS THIS SITE SO GREEN

Of course, they express this in all sorts of ways, like “Jesus Christ My Eyeballs” and “I tried to read what he wrote but I could only make it a few sentences in before I had to give up for all the green and white text.” Now, we’ll set aside that there’s no green and white text and seriously, this isn’t exactly running through a wall of fire, but OK, I got it.

So then I go into this little side loop that I tend to do under such circumstances. I consider alternate configurations of the style sheet. I wonder about programming in some sort of cookie system to allow you to choose, which is much easier with Wordpress now that I converted to it. I re-imagine a way I could flitter around the system and make some changes to get into the black-on-white bus and go down the line to mainstream acceptable, allowing these fine folks to concentrate on the substance of my writing, and not the eye-searing green of it.

But you know what?

I call up the weblog’s front page to look at it and begin this task, and I just stop dead.

I mean, I just sit there and I fuckin’ smile. Not an evil smile, like I’m putting poop in your mailbox. I mean the smile you get when you smell the boardwalk, or hear a forgotten song that played at your favorite dance. It’s the smile of nostalgia, of happiness, of a simpler time. I mean, I am in a total other place just by looking at my weblog.

I remember the 3279 I used to use at Dad’s work at IBM. The screen looked like this:

I’d sit in that side office while dad did his required work, and it’s where I first played Adventure, and Hunt the Wumpus, and a whole bunch of other stuff that was mindblowing to a 10 year old. I mean, it was just so great.

At school, I’d be using a bunch of Apple IIs. I don’t mean the Apple IIs with color displays. I’d be hooked up to one of these babies:

Oh, fine, it didn’t say “Linux” on the screen and it didn’t have a machine 1000x as fast sitting next to it glowing blue, but it would have the double disk drives and it would have that great glowing light on the keyboard and it definitely had this beautiful green monitor, with the sharp-as-a-tack letters on it and the clear font telling me that if I’d just sit down and play with it, magic would happen.

Hell, forget being specifically young. From when I was in my 20s, all the way to the present day, nothing tells me that fun is about to happen than seeing one of these around:

Trust me: adding a VT-220 dumb terminal into the mix is like adding a punch bowl full of alcohol to a literary event: cool shit will ensue. I know, just seeing that beautiful text there on that self-enclosed little machine, that the world is waiting for me and once I start typing, I will have things to explore.

I promise you, I sit down often and think about modifying the site. I think about the people claiming my site is actively hurting them without being the direct reciever of my insults and litanies. I know that for some people it must be like staring into the very face of Hell, the glittering eyes of The Unnamed One piercing into their skulls and leaving tiny scars on their retinas.

I feel for you. I want to help you.

I can’t. I am powerless.

The green wins.

OK, so because I wrote some stuff about my opinion about black-box shared resources and its consequence on data sustainability, I have gotten a lot of attention from a lot of people, some positive and some negative. We’ll set the positives aside, and most of the negatives, as well. Many negatives are from people who confused “don’t trust and don’t assume the best of” to mean “never use under any circumstances and lordy gee this new technology scares me“. Some utilize the term “cloud” in their business plan or career and so we can’t be having anyone saying it’s.. you know, overused and drilled into meaningless at the present time, and in other ways misleading. All well and good. Glad for the chat, people! I’m sure we’ll do coffee and quibble about this more in the future.

But there were a couple, only really a couple, who took a different tactic altogether, much more interesting for my purposes and perspective. That tactic can be stated as follows:

I am happy to say that I don’t care about my data.

This is a nuanced difference from “who cares”, which is more germaine to someone who walks into another person’s opinion and doesn’t agree. You don’t care about the opinion, don’t completely side with the choice of words, but probably have some common ground. You just don’t think it needs discussion, or don’t feel like hearing the discussion. You don’t care.

This is different. This is willful glee/pride in that you don’t care about your stuff.

So here’s the pages by the two guys,  Rob Sayre (Webcite) and Victor Stone (Webcite). Note that I have to include webcitation (archived) links to the pages since they have clearly stated they don’t particularly care about the viability/sustained life of their data.

In both cases I show up and make unpleasant responsive noise. In both cases we either agree to disagree or I am handed a suggestion of medical diagnosis.  What’s also interesting is that one is relatively young (Rob) while the other relatively older (Victor). Then again, perhaps the spectrum of folks who take their position go all over the map.

Either way, the fundamentals are completely skewed from where I come from. To Rob, the desire to protect or maintain one’s creations/data/information is egoism:

Using the Cloud doesn’t mean you have to trust it. The catch is that you have to not care, which is not really a catch, since the alternative is that your Stuff ends up owning you.

To Victor, there is a pride in handing away and not caring about things, informational, physical, or otherwise. 

True story: some months ago my wife and I sold our house. Let the lease expire on the car. Gave away our 500 books. Gave away 2,000 albums. Let go of all the furniture. Berkeley restricts trash pickups to just one can so there were lots of trips to the dump, including all the music I’ve recorded for the last 35 years. I figured I was saving my kids a trip to the dump after I’m dead.

Contrast with my hero Mark Pilgrim’s post which falls among similar lines. He equates divestment of material and things to be the key to happiness, and I could totally see this position; he portrays them as steps along a personal goal, and thinks others should do the same. He makes this point in a cute manner, devoid of judgementalism and (for that matter) context. Where I am abrasive, he is clever and smooth; I totally understand that. As I’ve said in several contexts over the last week or so, you catch more flies with honey, but I prefer to just use a flamethrower. Still, Mark’s posting, more a numbered poem, is a goal for some, just not for me.

In the case of these two other fellows (and ones like them), there’s a sort of approach to life with regards to “stuff” that’s certainly different from mine; fundamentally different. I think it can be stated, quite clearly, that I DO have an attachment to stuff, to things, although I do make an effort to understand the people behind those things. That inherent drive to maintain and collect things is not a point of shame with me; it’s a point of pride, as I like to think it is for any archivist. To tell me not to archive is to tell a musician not to make music, a craftsman to not build, and Jim Aikin to not be a misanthropic jerk. It’s in the blood. It’s not in everyone’s blood.

Now, far be it out of line to point out that someone so deeply associated with the maintenance of open standards and doing engineering in Mozilla would be a little less dismissive about wanting to protect data, but that’s just me way over here.

But Victor, well, that guy’s just dead.

Dead, dead, dead. In the ground. He’s done. What’s left for him is lying about and doing some hanging out with family and friends before he finishes scooping up handfuls of dirt and patting them on his head, gingerly. I feel quite free in making this declaration, just like he decided he didn’t like the tone of my entry, presupposed a series of silly, non-related declarations, and then responded poorly when the person who he names in the entry title shows up to chat. I love people like this, because it reminds me that for all the unpleasant things I am, there are many unpleasant things I’m not.

What I am not is gleeful in my mortality, looking at my time as this sort of placeholder, where I did some stuff and then I’m doing everybody a favor by getting rid of it as quickly, cleanly, and comprehensively as possible. I don’t take pride in that. I don’t look at myself as a sad little consumer tube, pulling in stuff one end and then blowing it out the other, into the trash. This position is particularly silly one for a musician, because musicians are the very heart of creation, just as sermonists are; they bring out things from the air and their minds and make them available to whatever degree life presents them. They literally create something from nothing, save the caloric requirements of a functioning brain. It’s a miracle to behold, one of life’s great examples. As a music guy, you’d think he’d get this. But he doesn’t. He’s dead.

Death comes to us all; this is true. And it’s true that at the end of your life, the remnant traces you leave to others to solve, the puzzles of financial woes and commitments and unpaid human debt might be an unfair bequest, but not all bequests are unfair, nor the act of bequesting itself. I have been through the works of many people who are no longer with us, and I’ve spent times recording and listening to the stories of these people and returned later to find them gone. This is what happens, and yet I do not feel burdened to have known their stories, or, in some cases, given things from their lives by their survivors to help archive or maintain. I am honored.

Maybe my relationship to “stuff” is different from these two guys, but it might go further than that. Maybe my relationship to everything is different. And when I’m done, or finished in some physical or effort-related manner, I would hope that I wouldn’t look at the result as trash to be discarded before someone else must regard it, but a life well spent and a body of work/collection worth sorting through, while I myself am dead.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of attending ROFLthing, a smaller form of ROFLcon, the Conference of Internet Memes. Held in New York City, it was a one-day event with a collection of speakers, guests, and as it turned out, a couple hundred attendees and press/documentary people. As one of the speakers, I had the opportunity to present about Sockington, the little grey cat with the thousands of followers. (He had 10,000 on Saturday but is at nearly 13,000 now.)

As I spent the week before slamming away on my presentation, one of my friends asked why I was working so hard when I can do some sort of presentation in my sleep, especially on a subject I know so well. And the answer, really, was that I don’t want to sleep through my own presentation; if I don’t keep trying new things and attempting more trickery and showmanship backed up by research and preparation, I will stagnate. No thanks.

The presentation, entitled EGAD TUNA, included an OpenOffice Impress presentation, which had many dozens of slides and is located here (12mb). If you want the short-form, it’s this:

• I’ve been internet famous before.
• I enjoy this Sockington thing.
• I did it by combining a cat and twitter.
• It was initially fun.
• It continued being fun for social experiments.
• It means a lot to people (and to me).
• I will keep doing it.

Along the way, I try to bring up some points about the process that involves Sockington.

I like to walk a venue before I work on a presentation for it, but I didn’t really have that choice in this case. 

I also chose an unusual getup, which seems to be more and more what I like to do in high-profile situations. It may or may not help the presentation itself, but it lends an interesting tenor to photographs of my stage presence:

Mentioning as an aside, there were a group of people who self-styled themselves as commentators on the event, acting as if heckling was some new and refined art. At twice their age, I’ve seen and heard better, more incisively, and delivered with more punch. I ended up having to deal with them before and after the presentation, in my own way, and some people acted like this was more special or unusual than one might encounter otherwise in a non-academic presentation. Let me dissuade you immediately; when alcohol or camraderie-inspired bravado enters the mix, it always results in some silliness from the back (or front) rows. It’s up to the presenter to be quick on their feet to deal with it.

Normally, I endeavor to record my own presentations, but there was just too much on the plate this time and I’m depending on others to have captured it. I thought I got all of what I was trying to get across, and if there were pauses and stumbling, it was mostly centered around the undependability of my remote-control clicker and feeding off the tenor of the crowd.

A long time ago a very smart man told me to never act like my potential audience had been saturated, and to never be surprised that more and more people would hear of me the first time, and this was certainly the case here; in the days hence folks have found my other work or more about me from this speech, and written in. We can sometimes convince ourselves that we are more prominent (and relevant!) than we actually are.

I’m most proud of this slide:

What I am saying is that sometimes we can be a little too judgemental about what others do, and decide the relevancy/usefulness/meaning of that activity based on our own preferences. I tried to be as succinct and yet funny as I could about it, but the situation is serious: so many people weigh in and decide what others should do, and think they’re being clever or insightful with their observation. They’re just not. Link them to this graph all you want.

The other slide I liked was listing all the crap that’s gotten me attention over the years. See how many of them you know:

And see, right up to the minute with the mention of the Anti-Cloud thing which I will not discuss in detail at this moment. 

In summary, I am pleased with the presentation. I’m sure some copy of it will come out someday, and until then, you have the PDF to play with.

As for the rest of the conference, well, I am really unhappy that it was so short, because the combination of being interviewed, talking to people I never get to talk to, making new connections and running around meant I saw very little of the other presentations (except You Suck at Photoshop and Alexis Ohanian’s introduction), and that makes me sad. (Bre Pettis‘ presentation about rapid prototyping was very similar to one he gave at the Chaos Communications Congress a few weeks ago, and I saw that video, so that at least didn’t escape me.)

To list friends seen again and not seen again seems needlessly indulgent and weird, but I do say that I am impressed both with the variance of lives that come to these (people complain it’s all rich white college kids and they are deluded) and the new acquaintances and friends I make as a result of these. As someone who spends a lot of time working through data and concentrating on the activities of machines, I drink up opportunities to find out what else is going on, and so far the ROFL people are 2 for 2 in terms of absolute success. I look forward to more, maybe just from the seats next time.

I have a policy about comments. I probably should put it somewhere. How about here!

Some weblogs are in the business of hits. Among the things they do to ensure hits, besides writing about subjects that Adwords says a lot of people want to know about, is to try to keep a good frothy conversation going. In the case of the wordpress/weblog paradigm, this means getting people to drop comments under your posts.

I don’t quite work that way; I write these entries as little essays, little columns in which I like to think I’m presenting a clear idea and a thesis, and that’s that. Some of my entries might be meta-discussions (like this one) or some might just be a link to another site with a bunch of commentary and thoughts on it. But generally, they’re kind of intended to be self contained.

Note I’m not saying civil, all-encompassing, or the last word, but I don’t generally write them like I’m waiting breathlessly for other people to come in and “finish” them. I consider this an approach I call lazy as fuck. If my stuff can’t stand on its own, then I’m not happy with it.

People then comment underneath. Some people use it as a jumping off point for their own sub-entry, i.e. talking about themselves for some paragraphs. Some people tell me they agree with me, and then explain why. Other people say I’m a pile of bunk and explain that as well.

In most cases, I don’t respond. If I do respond, it’s because either I know the person on a different basis (Flack and I are buddies, Trixter and I do work together, Chris Orcutt’s my longest friend at a quarter-century plus, etc.) or because they have a specific question they’re asking.

I feel like the whole thing turns into a sniping match and degrades the worth if every other post in the commentaries are the original writer going “No, no, you misunderstand”, or, in my case, consistently deep and inappropriate personal insults. So I let it be, even if it looks like the person needs a whack with my 8″ of floppy disk.

So I guess what I’m saying is, ask me questions in the comments and I’ll generally respond. Rant at me and make fun of me, and I’ll let your position stand without trying to dilute or mitigate you with an immediate “but wait” afterwards. Deal?

For nearly a week, I’ve had a window open on a news story. I’m mostly writing this because if I don’t do it, this window will stick around forever, begging me to do something with it.

The news story is a basic one. I’m pasting it here and here’s a link to it.

Father and son try to cut to front of line, go to jail
BY RICK YENCER (RYENCER@MUNCIE.GANNETT.COM)
JANUARY 13, 2009

MUNCIE — City police said a Frankfort man picked the wrong time to cut in line at the north Walmart store on Sunday, setting the stage for events that landed both him and his father in the Delaware County jail.

Edward R. Pluhar Jr., 26, was preliminarily charged with battery on police officer Chris Kirby, while his father, 61-year-old Edward R. Pluhar Sr., was preliminarily charged with criminal recklessness with a vehicle and intimidation.

According to police reports, officer Kirby was off duty as he waited in Walmart’s customer service line with his wife and daughter Sunday afternoon, and watched the younger Pluhar walk past him and directly to the service desk.

The police officer told Pluhar Jr. he needed to wait his turn, but the Frankfort man purportedly refused.

The elder Pluhar then allegedly approached the off-duty officer, told him to mind his own business and asked whether Kirby wanted to take the dispute outside.

When Kirby asked Pluhar Sr. what his intentions were, the Frankfort man purportedly said he would kick Kirby’s posterior and also suggested he might shoot him.

Kirby then informed the father and son that he was a police officer and called emergency dispatchers to send an on-duty officer to the scene.

The Pluhars then left the store, at 4801 W. Clara Lane, with Kirby following them to the parking lot and then standing behind their van as they attempted to leave.

The van, driven by the elder Pluhar, allegedly hit the officer’s leg. Kirby and the younger Pluhar then fought, reports said.

Patrol officers Kevin Durbin and Jess Neal then arrived and arrested the father and son without incident.

Edward Pluhar Sr. was released from the county jail Sunday after posting a $5,000 bond, while his son was released on a $2,500 bond.

Now, you read this little story, and assuming you don’t know any named folks or lived in the town, this article is of a specific relevance to you. If, however, you either know the people or lived in the town, it has another.

What fascinated me was that this news story has a comment section, and it started to go a little bonkers. Unfortunately, believing everyone is telling the truth, is who they are, or is remembering/describing things accurately requires a bit of a suspension of disbelief. To save you some time, here’s some relevant postings on there.

The Pluhars are Assholes

I have had dealings with both of these guys and it’s been a long time coming for them. In fact I’m kind of suprised this hasn’t happened to them sooner.

The Cop is an Asshole

I know from experience,that this police officer has and still does misuse his authority. he doesn’t need a uniform or a badge to think he is “The Punisher”. those just enhance his ego and makes him feel like he untouchable…I wonder if it is available to the public of ALL the complaints that have been filed against this police officer?

I have to say knowing Kirby this doesnt surprise me. If this had been any other officer there would not have been an issue. In this case A**es have a problem dealing with other A**es.

To bad that kriby didnt get his butt kicked. He is a thug in a police uniform. I have seen the way him and his dad treated the kids at wilson middle school, before they got the boot. haha

Too bad officer Kirby’s dad wasn’t there. Father & son, against father & son. Too bad for the Pluhars!! LOL

lol humm kirby most likely started it lmfao and is there such a law on the books u cant cut inline lol and kirby should have never got behide there van i see this as a case that want go to trial hick town muncie

Fuck Muncie, Fuck Frankfort

I am curious what a father and son from Frankfort was doing at the Muncie Store. Makes you wonder if they have something going with returning items. Hummm. Maybe Walmart and Police need to check into this. Kirby’s child must have been scared to death, how dare these thugs.

I am in Indy, Noblesville, Marion, Anderson or Kokomo on a daily basis. I did not know that I’m not allowed to shop at any of the stores there. I’m glad that you pointed out the fact that it is illegal. I hope your post serves to educate others and keep them out of trouble as well. Wait, just maybe it is not illegal to be in a store just because you don’t live in that city. I will call a lawyer and check. Hummm.

Kirby is a hot head. I bet a whole lot more went on outside the store then what he is stating. I’m sure he provoked them into something. Muncie police have a few hotheads and bad seeds. Until they fix these problems how can you trust any of them. They do lie and protect one another.

“Kirby is a hot head.” That is a flat out LIE! I personally know Kirby and his dad (Bill was an MPD legend) Chris is the most laid back guy I know, but not going to be pushed around either! Good job Chris I am proud of you!

Why does this stuff always happen at the Southside Wal-Mart. lol

I Have Absolutely No Additoional Facts But Don’t Let That Stop Me

It’s probably just a coincidence that they both have on black tee-shirts. i would be soooo wrong to assume that they are stereotypical bullies who wear Harley Davidson black shirts 24/7 365, and strut around with a chip on their shoulder like emotional 6 year olds trying to intimidate everyone with their ‘bad assedness”. So i won’t do that.

Good Job Officer Kirby!! I’m soooo glad to see someone standing up the a$$holes in this city. You put this white trash right were they belonged!!……What makes them think they are any better than anyone else? They should have waited in line like everyone else!!!!! I hope the judge really sticks it to them!!!!

His head is shaped more like a Pumpkin with all it’s innards scraped out and a “What, Me worry” (Alfred E Newman / G Bush) look on his face. Seriously. Those two fools need jail time with Bubba to get the crystal meth fight fuel out of their system and go on back to their Frankton lab…. 

I don’t live in your area, I found the link on the internet and read the story so I have no bias toward anyone involved in the incident.

From the tone of this story, it seems to me the officer escalated a situation that did not need to be turned into an incident. Sure, the guy was being a jerk but that’s not against the law. Cutting in line at Wal*Mart is not against the law. 

Based solely on the article, it appears we have an officer who likes the power of being able to arrest and control other people. At the very least, he went well over the top and contributed to an incident being escalated. 

If the men did what this story says then the law should treat them as such. However, this officer is not innocent and blameless in the situation and I hope the police chief will discipline the man for unnecessarily escalating a situation and acting in an unprofessional manner.

When the father allegedly walked up to the officer and told him to mind his own business and would he like to step outside (and this news article looks like it’s taken from the police report so it would be the officer’s version of events) the officer could have simply said no and defused the situation. Instead, it appears the officer wanted to provoke a confrontation. 

Standing behind the van to block it? That’s just immature and unprofessional. If the man used a credit card to pay, you can track the name. There are video cameras in Wal*Mart. There are ways to find out who the men were without blocking their vehicle and putting yourself in unnecessary danger.

There’s more, of course. Feel free to read them all via the clunky interface over at the page.

Some footage I recorded at a MC Frontalot concert last year. The first song is his now-refined, awesomely delivered version of the song he wrote for GET LAMP, “It is Pitch Dark”. Enjoy.

MC Frontalot at Harper’s Ferry (Allston, MA) (2008) from Jason Scott on Vimeo.

This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this position. So here we go.

FUCK THE CLOUD.

By the cloud, of course, I mean this idea that you have a local machine, a box running some OS, and a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand. These machines are connected via the internet, and if you have a company then these other machines are not machines run by your company, and if you’re a person they are giving it to you without you signing anything accompanied by cash or payment that says “and I mean it“.

Can I be clearer than that? It’s a sucker’s game. It’s a game suckers play. If you are playing it, you are a sucker.

The term, like many of its sort, has deep, deep roots in the industry that it’s being foisted upon. I’m in no mood to find specific citations today but you can be assured that the idea of a “cloud” to represent the outside network was on whiteboards that I saw working as a temp in NYNEX research labs in the late 1980s. And even by that date, it was an understood context, one going back years before.  (Terms I’ve seen retrofitted to give both the sense of timeliness and timelessness include zero-day, warez, and the war- prefix).

But this new round of it comes pre-packaged with marketer infestation. After all, it’s a great word: it insinuates soft fluffiness, a size and grandeur, and a fuzzy meaninglessness. So if you fail to deal with the underlying hard facts and cases, who can blame you? It’s a cloud. Soft, huggable cloud, I do love you and your rounded edges.

But what this all kind of hides is the situation of how you feel about stuff you generate.

Let me step aside and say that as a historian guy, I am big into collecting a lot of cast-offs. This is what I do. I’ve downloaded thousands of podcasts and millions of blog posts and a lot of other insane stupid stuff. We’ll get from that what we can, in the future. This is not about that.

This is about your data. This is about your work. This is about you using your time so that you make things and work on things and you trust a location to do “the rest” and guess what, here is what we have learned:

• If you lose your shit, the technogeeks will not help you. They will giggle at you and make fun of your not understanding the fundamental principles and engineering of client-server models. This is kind of like firemen sitting around giggling at you because you weren’t aware of the inherent lightning-strike danger of improperly bonded CSST.
• Since the dawn of time, companies have hired people whose entire job is to tell you everything is all right and you can completely trust them and the company is as stable as a rock, and to do so until they, themselves are fired because the company is out of business.
• You are going to have to sit down and ask yourself some very tough questions because the time where you could get away without asking very tough questions with regard to your online presence and data are gone.

These questions that you have all work around that other overused word: value. To me, history guy, your old junk you used to do is of interest to me. But there’s a lot of people and a lot of stuff, so I wouldn’t want you to do it just for little ol’ me. But for yourself? What about yourself?

What of your work do you value? All of it? Likely not. The time you spend downloading a lot of porn, for example, is pretty cool, and if you lost all the porn, you’d probably be unhappy, but you could probably get the porn back or brand new porn that’s like porn 3.0 and new levels of porn. Probably the same for movies, for music – oh no, this data is gone, but why worry about it, you didn’t make the music or movies, so it’ll work itself out.

Less so the things you make: the writing, the linking of friends, the combined lists you collaborate on – maybe that has some value to you. When you die, of course, everyone else starts attaching arbitrary value to things you worked on or forgot about. A childhood photo of you has new meaning because the person the child became is gone. The essay you wrote in elementary school about being successful has more meaning because you turned out to be very successful. Again, this is value imposed from outside.

So what, then? What is really of meaning to you? Your twitters? Your weblog entries? Your list of bookmarks? Your photos? What?

Because if you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service (or ad-supported service), quietly flinging you past an End User License Agreement that indicates that, at the end of the day, you might as well as dragged all this stuff to the trash. If it goes, it’s gone.

There was a time when we gave the Cloud (before it was a Cloud) a big pass because technology was kind of neat and watching it all actually function is cool. I mean, if someone gives you an amazing Moon Laser and the Moon Laser lets you put words on the side of the moon, the fact that the Moon Laser’s effects wear off after a day or so isn’t that big a deal, and really, whatever you probably put on the side of the Moon with your Moon Laser is probably pretty shallow stuff along the lines of “WOW THIS IS COOL” and “FUCK MARS”. (Again, to belabor, a historian or anthropologist might be into what people, given their Moon Laser, chose to write, but that’s not your problem). Similarly so, with those early BBS writings, or the first web forums, or the first photo album sites, or the sites from 1993 and 1994. Interesting, neat, but your “work” among these halting baby steps isn’t causing you despair if it goes away. (And you’re pleasantly surprised when it shows up again, sometimes.)

Contrast, though, when people are dumping hundreds of hours a year into the Cloud. Blowing out photos. Entering day after day of entries. Sharing memories, talking about subjects that matter to them. Linking friends or commenting on statuses or trading twitters or what have you. This is a big piece, a very big piece of what is probably important stuff.

Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please:

• Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.
• Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid. Make fun of these people, and their shitty little Cloud Cities running on low-grade cooking fat and dreams. They will die and they will take your stuff into the hole. Don’t let them.
• Recognize a Cloud when you see it. Are you paying for these services? No? You are a sucker. You are giving people stuff for free. I pay for Vimeo and I pay for Flickr and a couple other things. This makes me a customer. Neither of these places get my only copy of anything.
• If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties are cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.

So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it right in the ear. Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe you’ll make out, maybe you won’t. But he ain’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow.

And that’s that.

I’m rather conflicted about the death of Google Catalogs, an excellent tech demonstration by Google of reading and browsing through catalogs of all stripe, implementing near-seamless searching of the content via OCR, so you could search for, say, “tuna hat” and if any of their catalogs (which went into the hundreds) had a tuna hat, you would see it instantly, along with a contextual shot of the catalog page with this text. I mean, that’s pretty amazing. It blew me away back in 2001 when I saw it. It was like magic.

I know the story of this being a side project scanned in a back room at Google and that it grew in attention and space and eventually had a pretty amazing site going. I know, on a historical basis, that these catalogs are themselves historically interesting. Maybe I’m weird that way, but if you browse, for example, the Shelburne Holiday Catalog from decades ago, you can find in it all sorts of perspective on consumer electronics, the process of selling these items, and all the attendant history of that 1983 period. It makes me sad to think all these scanned catalogs will now disappear, although I’m sure within the context of google it will not disappear. We just won’t get to see it.

But having said this and having been sad about the prospect of Google Catalogs’ impending death (and hey, nice 24 hour fucking warning, guys) is the other secret situation, which is Google totally dropped the ball on that site.

The LAND’S END catalog, a constantly updating entity if there ever was one, wasn’t updated for years. Many of them hadn’t been updated for years. The weblog entry that announces the closure indicates that it “hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products”, well fucking yeah. If your site is about catalogs and you don’t update the catalogs for years then people tend not to go to you for catalogs. The “popularity” they speak of is internal popularity, the willingness of people within the company to allocate resources for the somewhat unsexy prospect of scanning catalogs.

They could have opened connections with companies to send them TIFF or JPG files directly. They COULD have offered PDFs. They COULD have set up something where they got some money for doing all this service. But they didn’t and I’m not in the Second-Guess Google’s Business Model business.

But I’m right. The shine is off the apple, the bloom is off the rose. I’m really glad I got to see it before things turned grey and I have one or two very specific people to thank for that; I will never forget it.

I think we have some interesting time ahead.

Oh, and P.S., I’m adding 12 gigabytes of product manuals to pdf.textfiles.com today.

To everyone I have ever played a game of Halo with, who was spectacularly good when their levels indicated they had barely started within the game; to all those folks whose profile implied they were but mere novices in the Halo 3 universe and yet showed surgeon-like precision in playing against me, utilizing tricks I’d never seen before… I apologize.

I thought you were playing the game. To that end, starting over with a new account so that you would be matched against folks slowly gaining in rank and skill and who were unbelievably overmatched by your tsunami of Halo-induced terror.. well, that would be a dick move.

But today, while talking with a young sprite I’d been matched up against in a doubles match, and faced against two users whose names were, I am not kidding, you can get and it on ebay, a new perspective was foisted upon me.

They’re playing for money.

I know I will sound sarcastic and mean here, but I’m not: this explains everything. It’s a total load off my mind. I was trying to figure out this insane, bizzare behavior by some of these guys. They would have 20 games under their belt and be just massively ranked up. And when they played, well, fuck. They’d run through deadly power drains, run straight at me, drop down from high heights to crack my shit up. It was like fighting The Alien over and over, and I kept wondering what joy there was in playing like an insane kamikaze in a game that encourages, at least peripherally, some strategy.

But see, if it’s for money, then it all makes sense.

What they do is get the accounts up to the top tier (Level 50) as fast as possible, and then sell it on Ebay. Go do a search for “Halo” and “50″ and you will see “Halo 50 for Sale” and “We do Halo 50s” and even the scratched out beginnings of a competitive market, with laudings of “we do any variant” and throwing around words like “guaranteed” and “ready to go“, indicating they have, of all things, a stock.

Oh, the confusion and anger that has drained away from me.  These aren’t players, these are wage slaves. They’re not playing a game, they’re at their second job. With this cash, all manner of pot, beer, road trip, food and accessory money is being made. They’re hustling. I can get behind hustling.

Shit, son. Do you know how I made money from 1993-1995? Let’s make that one clear. I used to draw caricatures while dressed in a cow suit. I should make a whole weblog entry on that, but let me just say, that when I was out there at 10pm, dressed like a moron and taking it from crazy college drunks, hangin’ with the homeless and listening to that completely burnt out musician play “No Woman No Cry” for the hundredth fucking time, it was because I’d walk home with a couple hundred bucks. Money I used to pay rent, or be able to take my date out to a nice place, or otherwise get myself a little something to get through the day. That’s right. I’d buy 100-packs of 3.5″ floppies for my Amiga.

I know, I know, a lot of you are going duhhhhhh but that’s because I didn’t think it through. I play Halo because it is a game. I forgot how far things had gone. They’ve gone quite far indeed.

I’ll let you guys have a pass next time. After all, times are tough. And when you’re at the bottom of the wage barrel in an online sweatshop, a little hand up anywhere probably makes your day.