During the presentation I gave at ROFLthing this past January about Sockington, I pulled out a term from the air to describe something I’ve been seeing in action lately.  Here’s what the slide looked like, courtesy of Scott Beale of Laughingsquid:

What’s been really interesting for me in the past 20 years or so is watching theoretical situations become hard reality, and then that hard reality encountering problems that the theoretical situations never even dreamed of. At one time, and stick with me here, it was really weird and unlikely that newspaper stories would become available online, and especially not for free, and especially not instantly. In fact, it is now the case that stories become available online before they are even printed anywhere. In the 1980s this seemed an unlikely occurrence, but then became more and more likely, until we have the current situation that it’s expected. With this now expected situation additional unexpected situations like print newspaper collapsing, always-there inherent flaws in journalism being ripped apart, and low-cost aggregators that once were thought to be moneymaking opportunities in the “smart agent” space that are now so beneath economic contempt that you wouldn’t get three sentences in with your business plan before you found yourself on the curb, watching a truck hauling away empty newspaper vending machines. You just could not sell that idea anymore.

Taking it further, there are now flash-powered projects which sit on news feeds and create spinning globes showing you where the current hot thing is taking place. This is science fiction level stuff, and at this point it’s a free application on the Nintendo Wii, functioning as a screensaver. We both knew this was coming and didn’t know this was coming. Now that it’s here, the response by some might be “And this is what we’d hoped it’d be?” or more likely “Is that what you considered the big cool future thing while using your home computer 20 years ago?” Well yes, yes. Our dreams are still big; it’s just the future that got small.

But along with this dreamland have come problems we are totally unprepared for and situations we’re not even getting a full grasp around. And I think one of the biggest is Opinion Spectrum Collapse Disorder.

Come with me back in time to the Debate Den. This small textfile was captured by me in 1984, from an excellent BBS called The Safehouse in Minneapolis. (How joyful it was for me to meet some of the sysops of this board for my documentary.) As one might find children playing with handguns or chemistry sets containing radioactive materials to be a bit troubling peering through a modern sensibility, so too might one be amazed that someone would start a discussion board this way:

Numb: 1
Subj: [ Debate Den ]
From: SAFEHOUSE MANAGER
Date: 08-03-84 at 02:02 AM

Welcome to the Debate Den!

The Den is for debate and discussion on almost any topic you wish...

This room is especially for political discussion, since this is an election
year...

Go ahead.. post!

Could you imagine? Can you even think, in this modern day, both starting a political discussion on purpose, or, for that matter, writing such a happy go lucky invitation for debate? As if you were seeking it out? Like plastic or internet access, a once rare thing is now so common that its mere existence is not a miracle, and in fact has degraded to an air-like status: it’s just there, and sometimes it is choking.

This textfile is also an indicator of the speed at which a BBS might move. If you take the time to go through the timestamps of the file, you get this list:

Date: 08-03-84 at 02:02 AM
Date: 08-03-84 at 01:05 PM
Date: 08-03-84 at 02:37 PM
Date: 08-04-84 at 02:13 AM
Date: 08-05-84 at 03:48 AM
Date: 08-05-84 at 04:36 AM
Date: 08-29-84 at 10:44 PM
Date: 08-30-84 at 02:31 AM
Date: 08-31-84 at 12:21 AM
Date: 08-31-84 at 11:24 AM
Date: 08-31-84 at 01:02 PM
Date: 08-31-84 at 03:54 PM
Date: 09-01-84 at 07:06 PM
Date: 09-01-84 at 08:46 PM
Date: 09-02-84 at 12:49 AM
Date: 09-02-84 at 07:02 PM
Date: 09-02-84 at 07:33 PM
Date: 09-03-84 at 12:19 AM
Date: 09-03-84 at 12:50 AM
Date: 09-03-84 at 04:14 PM
Date: 09-05-84 at 12:23 AM
Date: 09-07-84 at 05:10 PM
Date: 09-07-84 at 10:06 PM
Date: 09-07-84 at 10:09 PM
Date: 09-08-84 at 04:16 AM
Date: 09-10-84 at 03:24 PM

Seriously, that’s all the posts, and this was a very popular BBS by 1984 standards, and even had two incoming phone lines for multiple injected messages into a given topic. As you can see, sometimes a whole day or even two will go by before a single message is posted, followed by another few days afterwards for a possible response.

In this environment, everything tends to run cool, although flamewars are definitely possible. But a flamewar then is usually a small number of folks dropping into well-worn melees. The introduction of Fidonet, where hundreds of people could interact with each other, definitely turned the notch up. Postings would echo throughout the Fidonet network (and other similar multi-BBS networks) and result in a much more heated discussion.

Compare that, however, to the modern day, where a message base like Fark or Something Awful can have the most specific topic of discussion, a specific event related to a single person hurting themselves, or a found personal item in a subway, and it can instantly expand into a multiple-hundreds-of-participants orgy of linguistic violence.

As the accessibility of a conversation increases, so too does the spectrum of opinion brought to that conversation, until the opinions range along such a wide spectrum that the conversation simply cannot move forward. It will continue to grow, but like a tumor it is useless and for all purposes dead. It will not better anyone involved in it. The conversation has collapsed from the width of the spectrum of opinion.

This will happen more, not less, while engineering continues to deal with the problem as a single-troublemaker issue and not a human nature issue. Broadcast mediums, inherently sterile in presentation, will often represent the cleanly-polished conclusion of a thousands-of-mails-and-contacts pile in the back office. When contemporary people attempt to emulate the positive aspects of this model (clean and clear message, polished delivery, delineated plotline) without understanding the garbage collection behind the screen, they end up falling in on themselves.

Archiveteam, the proposed league of archiving superheroes I mentioned in a weblog entry and then another one, has been a wonderful success so far. The website is being updated frequently, the occasional project goes underway to save things, and a sad loneliness I felt about the process of saving things has been greatly assuaged. I encourage you to visit the site, contibute thoughts and ideas, and be sure to tip us off when something has gone terribly wrong. The goals are myriad but I think the easiest one to achieve is to highlight and embarass companies that take a cavalier attitude to removing user data with extraordinarily short notice.

It’s amazing what happens when you ask for help.

Ah, Mister Joe Clark.

A person who has created some sort of visual work that has spoken language will decide they want it to be more accessible, either to people who don’t speak the language or to a raft of other folks (who I’ll cover in a moment). Naturally, these people will start searching around on Google or other engines to find anyone discussing the subject, and will, occasionally, end up on your site. A cursory glance appears to be just the medicine/resource they’re looking for; a wide range of entries discussing subtitles, captions, accessibility and information on how to bring this into their project.

There are a number of such self-described gurus on the internet running websites as collections of their wisdom. Some seem altruistic, some fell into it and never left, and some are obviously using these sites as (nicely written) platforms towards attracting customers, employees or fans. Usually, one can find a selection of how-tos and collected reference documents, followed by quick-and-dirty overviews or thoughts on the subjects. You, on the surface, seem one of them. But you’re not.

What you are, ultimately, is what I would call a “Spec-Whore”. That is, someone who has gained access to documentation regarding specification and reference documentation on a given subject (in your case, captioning) and parlayed that into your own little empire, one in which your interpretation of them is law, the implementation by others is faulty and beneath contempt, and any attempts by those not touched by your magic wand/filter to interact with these specifications is worse than not doing it all.

You do not exude the positing and dismissal of a grand master who does his best to deter flighty students and then concentrating his efforts on those chosen few who pass the test. All are subject to your bile: expert, newbie and professional all fail under your withering, needlessly snarky gaze.

Your book on accessibility has amazon reviews decrying the manner in which you provide information. “holds all other human beings in contempt” seems to capture your writing style perfectly. (Awesome cover, by the way, causing unpleasant imagery in a 20 pages of good information spread along a 400 page miasma.)

I’m not the only person who finds you this way. In fact, even your needlessly threatening page about unpleasant comments about you has gained some small amount of infamy.

Perhaps you think this is some matter of “tough love”, that the road to success in your quest for employment and consultancy rests in coming off as one tough cookie. There is certainly precedent for that in some stories of success, but these stories usually involve a carefully chosen subset of your audience, not every living creature capable of clicking a mouse button. You are not a flashlight illuminating the subject; your writing is a nuclear bomb, obliterating the village you supposedly intend to save.

While the human race may fall beneath your radar in its incompetence in implementing standards of accessibility to your liking, the fact is that those of us merely using Subtitle Workshop or other tools to not require hearing or full attention to the screen do so because we want to help our audience. My mailbox has been filled with hundreds of letters thanking me for my attempts to caption/subtitle my documentary, whether from actual hard-of-hearing viewers or merely parents of young children sleeping in the next room who can only enjoy films quietly. Perhaps my subtitles fail to follow your perceived world but the audience speaks for itself.

Such as it is, what knowledge you may possess on this subject is of interest to two sets of folks: yourself, and anyone who does not take the time to dig deeper in your general posturing and realize you are an embittered, unpleasant self-styled expert who trashes anyone trying to do the right thing.

It pains me, literally pains me that people would still make the mistake of including you in a conversation regarding accessibility or multiple channels of information related to media; you destroy everything around you with your language, dismissing honest attempts to do right by people and gathering your meager talents in poring over available documentation to declare yourself the lord on high of your tiny little kingdom.

From: Ted Schredd - Discover Fun <tedschredd@discoverfun.com>
To: mailbox@textfiles.com
Cc: legal@discoverfun.com; admin@discoverfun.com; securitybreach@discoverfun.com
Subject: Fwd: Your content on your site...

Hey there,

Very funny content on your site here

http://www.textfiles.com/humor/bored.txt

Unfortunately you stole it from our site without giving us credit.
Please remove it immediately to avoid legal action

Yours truly,

Discover Fun Legal Department

This threat letter is particularly interesting once I put together two pieces of data.

Here’s the first piece of data:

And here’s the second piece of data:

snuhdot# pwd

/skimmilk/textfiles/humor

snuhdot# ls -l bored.txt

-rwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel  16723 Oct  6  1999 bored.txt

snuhdot#

P.S. This page was up in 2001. Maybe I should send them a letter…. oh wait, I’m not a deluded asshole.

Hurry, hurry, friends. This will probably be one of the only times you will be able to download and play a game that has Cory Doctorow, Emmanuel Goldstein, Bre Pettis, The Fat Man/George Sanger, Irina Slutsky, Jello Biafra, Bruce Sterling… and me.

I can barely describe this thing. Let’s see how they do it:

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf (pronounced “oon-taa-tsee-gars-doorf”) is the last existing client republic of the USSR. The soviet enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with the surrounding so-called “Republic of Austria” or with the capitalist fortress “European Union”. The downfall of the people’s motherland — the Soviet Union — in the early 1990s had a devastating effect on the country’s intra-economic situation. External reactionary forces threatened the last remaining proletarian paradise. Party secretary Wladislav Gomulka has been kidnapped and is being held in US-Oberzoegersdorf. We must save comrade Gomulka! Because communism isn’t an opinion. It’s a promise.

OK, then!

In this adventure game (which uses the AGS system) you guide around a little spy/soldier played by the incomparable Johannes Grenzfurthner (who I must say, was an incredible host when I was in Austria).

The game is truly crazy. I don’t even know how to tell you if you’ll like it or not, other than saying a lot of the humor is around ridiculing Soviet social constructs, and an awful lot of broken down stuff not quite working at all.

If you’re looking for me in the game, I’m some ways along in it, and I have a hammer. That’s all I’ll say.

I’m hosting Johannes in Boston on the 23rd-24th of March. I’m helping arrange a speaking engagement by him on the 24th. More details as I have them.

Until then, go download it and wonder what you got yourself into.

Think of all the time I’m going to save you.

Instead of writing a massive amount of flowery language about Racing the Beam, the new book co-authored by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, I am going to nail it right down to whether you will want or not want this book based on one section. In fact, on one set of discussions/writings in that one section.

The one section is about Pitfall, in fact, and it covers the ways the hardware design of the Atari 2600/VCS facilitated and limited the advantages of the game (and, indeed, all games written for the VCS). Through one particularly enlightening sequence, the authors demonstrate in basically clear language how the entire level design for the 255 rooms in Pitfall was compressed into 50 bytes. Woah, hey there cowboy, I didn’t write that wrong. They clearly and contextually explain to you how David Crane, the designer of Pitfall, encompassed the entire design for all 255 rooms of Pitfall in 50 individual characters.

That one section goes on to describe all other aspects of Pitfall, from how the running man character (Pitfall Harry) was a months-previous character existing long before the game, and how critical it was to ensure the black lines along the left side of available television screen space were consistent from top to bottom because the designers thought it ugly otherwise.

And that section is one of multiple sections, addressing Pitfall, Combat, Adventure, Yar’s Revenge, and a boatload of related aspects of the VCS.

You are either ordering the book now or you are waiting for me to go on another profane rant.

Look how much time I saved you.

Is it that time again? Why yes, friends, it most certainly is.

Yes, the demoparty that RaD Man and I run out during Notacon in Cleveland, Ohio is now going into its third year. The website will give you a lot more details that I should have to dump here, but rest assured we’re going strong and we’re working to bring you all sorts of fun, even outside all the great fun that Notacon is bringing to the table.

If you’ve attended before, the venue is different, a hotel right in the middle of the city. If you haven’t attended before this would be an excellent time to attend.

The event happens from April 16th-19th (Thursday is free) and I think you’ll have a great time. Go here to pre-register.

When I wrote out a quick little note to give my impression of cloud computing, I got a hell of a lot of feedback in the same way that an exploding oil tanker is getting a lot of feedback. So much anger and distaste, displeasure and for that matter some “hell yeahs” drowning out there among the pitchforks. What the fuck, people.

What I should have realized was that some people have hitched their wagons to this whorish little star, and anybody indicating the star is not a bright and shiny little piece of sky but an overblown crapfest term to be used however the overselling weasels wish to use it, would be pilloried.

Naturally, responses were all over the map, but I was particularly struck by this tool:

Funny, weren’t the same things said about eCommerce when it first hit? “I’d never trust a site taking my credit card.” Sure, there are still issues with security and privacy as related to eCommerce.” But wait now, could we live without our Amazon’s or other eCommerce-enabled sites? Hmmm. Also, your “understanding” of Cloud Computing is very shallow. Sure, Gmail is the cloud but it’s much broader and deeper than that. Of course you can bash and bad mouth things you don’t fully understand…and raise the FUD factor. New isn’t bad, new is different and takes time to be fully vetted, then either adopted or discarded. It’s your call. In the meantime, you can live in “history” but you might want to check out: http://www.nohardware.com as it sheds a different perspective on this…with a bang!

See how nice I am? I even leave in the link to his sensationalist, misdirecting, all-action-no-traction website, which features you “blowing up” servers because you don’t have to think about them. Of course, now he has to think about them and you better hope how he thinks about them is the same general realm and care that you were going to care and think about them… and naturally, you’ll want to spend some time considering whether this is all just like a taxi service calling itself nocar.com and blowing up cars because you won’t have to worry about them… might be good, might suck..

I am especially entranced by his position that I am a craven ignoramus, unable to fully comprehend the amazing cool things around me, and maybe with some effort I might just do so.. but then he compares it to the revolution of ecommerce, and implies that that problem is solved.

We’re not going to call that problem solved, are we? There’s still the occasional tiny flare-up in that realm and the concerns are ongoing, and valid. Saying “ppft” and “don’t worry your pretty little head” isn’t going to hide the fact that a lot of people, and stick with me here, a lot of people continue not to use ecommerce or online payment and for very valid reasons. Some people buy my documentaries via check and cash and money order. Some of my friends have websites and services that, because some component of them have untoward information or images, are flat-out censored by major credit card firms (of which there are very few) from doing any transactions whatsoever on the front or back end. Oh, and the minor issue where some links in the chain between credit card, vendor and credit firm would be transmitted in poor encryption or cleartext? That kind of didn’t go away, either. But this is nitty gritty stuff, stuff based in facts and history. Let’s ignore that and blow up some servers. Woo hoo!

Anyway, so soon after that article and the founding of the delightfully fun and exciting Archive Team project, a little event happened that I like to think shows where I’m coming from about this hue and cry, and perhaps mitigates the relatively unpleasant names I’ve been called for a couple months.

That event is the death of Magnolia.

Magnolia, if you missed it, was what you’d call a social bookmarking service. You would connect to it, put in bookmarks of sites and web objects you liked, and then others could share them or comment on them. This idea is not a single one; there’s a solid number of “social bookmarking” sites out there. Some are owned by big daddies now, while others continue to flump along in the cold world of independence. Magnolia was independent.

In January, something went wrong. Oh, so very wrong. Magnolia died. Died big, and died hard.

The message on the front, replacing years of data, explained that something had gone wrong and they were working on it, and utilizing data recovery. This should have been the time to go So, why not just restore from backup? Because that’s what you do when shit dies: you go to the backup. Not keeping a backup is up there with jabbing kids with the same needle during innoculations. You’re saving a relatively small amount of money for a needless and possibly inevitable risk.

Magnolia very obviously didn’t have a backup. The twittering about this is deliriously sad and lost: people talking about how years of work was missing and they couldn’t wait to get back on there so they could finally pull off their data.

Well, guess what. Turns out it was completely lost.

Now, let me talk a little about Larry Halff.

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

OK, so stick this out with me:

FUCK LARRY HALFF. He is the poster child for everything I’m talking about. Go ahead and listen to his mincing, wimpy, terrible description of how this site went down. Listen to the brilliant technical explanation he tries to give in explaining the technical issues. Enjoy the giggling as they talk about “lessons learned” and Larry’s smiling helpful advice that you should have good backups, and how it’s all very difficult to do all this, and that you shouldn’t do it yourself because it’s very hard. And if you have any history with computers, listen how he explains how way back in 2005 all this was just so very difficult to do things like have a functional IT infrastructure.

His ability to sit in a little room and talk about all this does not earn him praise. Oh wait, I mean it doesn’t earn any praise from me and people who have technical knowledge. Plenty of other people, their data in tatters and their histories gone, are more than willing to give him a hug, give him a helpful set of you-sure-tried-little-mister chin taps and let him off scot free.

What’s that, you say? Don’t put Fuck Larry Halff in bold letters in your weblog, because I haven’t met him, haven’t hung out with him, haven’t gotten to know him? Fuck knowing him. Hundreds of thousands of people use my sites and don’t know me. Some are better off for it, too.

Let’s be clear here. They took money from people. They’re refunding it, but they took money for a “premium” service. What does “premium” mean to you? Does it mean, I don’t know, baseline functionality?

The podcast I embed above minces about how we need to understand that it is so simple to set up a website and service and we should remember that, because then we misunderstand how these are just a few people behind a site. The flip side of this is that it is often equally easy to set up functional, solid code, done by single people, in their spare time. This isn’t discussed.

His explanations, terrible and useless as they are, cut to the heart of what I’m talking about. Surprise, kids, the service you were depending on turns out to be just a guy and some people working on a couple servers. Magnolia allowed exporting and had functionality to allow it, so they get a pass on that contingency, but apparently they didn’t find people exporting/sharing all that much, because there’s an awful lot of folks out there who have lost a lot of stuff, permanently. The outage was a wake-up call that turned out to be a bullet to the head.

So do this for me, readers. The next time you put stuff into a website, pay money to use a website’s premium function, find yourself spending hours a week on a site putting things into it, just use this magic word:

“Magnolia.”

And you will cast upon yourself a spell to at least attempt to do an immediate backup of your work on there, and if you don’t find a way to do a backup, demand one be made to you. You could also quiz the owners/maintainers of the site what their backup policies are, but bear in mind they’re probably going to lie to you, often without knowing it.

The party ended at magnolia. I hope you didn’t think it was a home.