Well, hasn’t it been a fascinating few days indeed.

Remember that, late last week, this project wasn’t even on the horizon. I mean, Archive Team was, and I had mechanisms and structure in place to call out to people, but there was no indication that Geocities was experiencing any problems or future changes. So this hit me at the same time it hit a lot of people who found it out – randomly, and spontaneously. The moment I heard was the moment I vowed to copy off as much as I could and store it away, for historical reasons. I did the same thing when FileFront announced closure; in that case, I brought some people to the table but the team that ultimately did most of the coordination and saving didn’t need my attention, and then the old owners came back and repurchased it anyway, obviating the problem. (The people I brought in kept a massive backup of a lot of FileFront from that; we still have it.) This FileFront FireDrill did wake the beast, so to speak. When Geocities started officially burning oil, we were already prepared to respond quickly. And we did.

As usual, I wrote inflammatory descriptions of our intentions. And, as occasionally is the case, this got passed around a bit. And then Slashdot got a hold of it and put a story out.

Now, Slashdot in 2009 is a hell of a lot different than the Slashdot of 1999; I’ve written about this trend before. Where once a Slashdotting packed a devastating whallop of terrifying magnitude, now it’s more in the area of a florist’s shop on the Thursday before Valentine’s day; bustling, busy, but nobody’s breaking down doors or climbing over the counter. Additionally, they linked to my dreamhost-hosted weblog and website, and while the Archive Team wiki’s got some lingering programming issues I need to fix, the weblog itself (this thing you’re reading) has this wonderful program called SuperCache that should really be a requirement if you run a Wordpress weblog – it makes it so your site does a fraction of the computational effort in the event of a Slashdotting or Digg or Reddit. So the waters rose a little outside my little weblog, and the commentary increased to 50 or more comments after the story instead of my usual 2-3, and then it faded.

As a side note, the usual intellectual pineapples of Slashdot are still in force – by far, my favorite one is where someone indicates I am part of the “Cult of Save Everything” and it is a sin for me to do this, at which point someone goes “what does it cost you for him to do this”, to which he responds “Eventually, someone will demand government money to save this junk! And then it will cost me, the taxpayer.” That, in itself, is classic Slashdot Awesome. 

That said, there were some excellent comments as well, as always, among the muck; like the person who pointed out that the Rosetta Stone is simply an announcement of a tax reduction, but the fact it’s in three languages provided a vital link to understanding previously unknown writing.

Like the fading rock star who can’t hit the high notes anymore, or the actor who hasn’t been in a blockbuster in decades, Slashdot may be down but can certainly get the attention of the influential. Or at least, the journalists. So within a short time the story of Archive Team’s Geocities Project ended up on Computer Buyers News, BoingBoing Gadgets, The Register (far and away my favorite), and even this classic rip-from-random-sources article in Web Host Industry Review. I wasn’t contacted about any of these.

Some other entities contacted me for interviews or statements, and I obliged. The NPR show Future Tense did a phone interview and so if you want to hear me say what I’ve been saying in my own voice, here you go. The whole show is a whopping five minutes, so it wouldn’t take you that long, should it interest you.

Anyway, so hooray, we got some attention, and more importantly to me, the idea and debate of “what to do when a major repository of community creation is destroyed for pure business reasons and with little or poor warning” got to the front of a few weblogs, twitter feeds and e-mails. This is kind of the most important aspect for me, you see. I live about 3500 feet from the Charles River, which used to have textile mill waste poured directly into it as a disposal method – the river would actually turn colors based on what dye was in use; kids would swim in that crap. I have a 1988  letter from an administrator at Digital Equipment Corporation announcing, from a Digital e-mail address, that he will no longer allow the passage of Fidonet traffic through Digital’s network equipment because the inventor of Fidonet was gay. Through reaction, attention-getting, and insistence, qualities once considered okay become not so okay, and ideally logic wins out. Right now it is not shameful or bad business practice to dispose of data immediately when it suits you – the practice of holding data in escrow for retrival for up to a year seems, to me at least, a step towards righting a wrong that many don’t consider a wrong at all – or don’t even think about. Trans Fats for the nerd set, I guess. So attention may or may not have that effect but I did something.

So speaking of doing something, the project is now in full bore. The process of grabbing material is not the difficult part – between a small handful of folks, the 200 gigabyte-a-day number could be maintained indefinitely, but we paused for a day or two while figuring out the best places to put it, the way to handle crazy filesystem issues, and all the logistical stuff you don’t initially think about when you run naked into the snow at midnight. I think we’ve got most of that handled at this point, and as we’re rsyncing between multiple “pools” of people with the capacity to hold all this incoming stuff, it’s just awesome to see the history literally flowing through the pipes. This is a lot of data, people; as I have indicated, this is an enormous cross-section of humanity, ranging from academics and historians through to music collectors, science fiction fans, conspiracy theories and prideful craftsmen. I’ve only occasionally glanced at stuff when a funny or interesting directory name goes by, but I am rewarded heavily by what’s here. As the amount of data grows (we are somewhere in the terabyte range, I believe, but further optimizations must be done), I expect this to only get better and better.

Oh, and did I mention the backlash?

Well, first of all, the usual bubbling mass of people who work with or for Yahoo and affiliated companies are not pleased about the general tactic I’ve taken of calling Yahoo all sorts of bad names and generally insulting the company’s good name. I’m sure some portion of them will have extra time to rip into me about this characterization, considering Yahoo is about to lay a bunch of them off.  If someone calls your company a barrel of bastard monkeys for doing what you can sort of origami yourself mentally into thinking is Good Business, you’re more than entitled to call me a heap of insulting names and indicate I am an ignorant foghorn interrupting your evening reading. Whatever makes the pillow feel like a vacation.

But many, many other folks came out of the woodwork, either to thank me and the project, ask further questions, or volunteer assistance. In fact, there’s almost too many people volunteering assistance. There’s only a limited amount of spectrum in the realm of grab everything off of Geocities, after all. So after the pile of people doing industrial-grade downloading and syncing, I’ve mostly been asking people to:

• Help improve the Archive Team Wiki. 
• Go find obscure sets of linked Geocities sites from things like mailing lists, usenet, forums, and so on.
• Track down obscure Geocities history and articles, so we can add it to the collection.
• Await further instructions.

Some people want to be The Hero and don’t want to wait out until the next phase of things happen – we’re going to end up with terabytes of this data and then we’re going to see where it goes, who we donate it too, how it might be stored, curated, and so on – so they’re somewhat antsy. I can’t do much about this, other than to point out that there’s so much to Geocities that you could probably soldier off on your own and not be completely redundant grabbing data. I’ve had people doing their own thing for 50 gigabytes and while 27 of it has overlapped, that means I got 23 more gigabytes of 150k Geocities HTML files and all the other attendant stuff in these sites. Millions of files we wouldn’t have gotten sooner.

What matters is stuff is being grabbed – I found discussions from sites that are into some obscure or non-mainstream hobby, who have gone “Holy crap, all our best old stuff is on Geocities!” and they’ve launched into projects to mirror the stuff; that warms my heart. And I’ve watched people on the Archive Team site go off and work on pretty damn complicated solution sets to deal with archiving a site that has millions of files – once they finish that stuff, the next Geocities-level crisis will be ever smoother to handle. Oh, it’s good. It’s good beyond good.

Other than that, not much to tell you. Running statistics against a set of machines that holds something like 8-10 million files is tedious and not overly informative. When we get to a certain breakpoint, I’ll give you the statistics that some like to hear – how many individual sites saved, how many different kinds of files we got, and so on. Right now, I’m just collecting hard drives from generous donators, downloading like crazy, and coordinating what needs coordinating. It’s going great!

Oh, one other bit.

With the implosion of Geocities imminent, a couple companies are stepping in with the shark-toothed smile and the outreached arms to capture up all these potential refugees. A couple contacted me. Here’s Dreamhost (with historically interesting story attached), and Jimdo Lifeboat (with theoretically-better long-term free hosting offer). I will not vouch for either; I’m just passing along who mailed in. Always keep a local backup, and don’t trust anybody.

More on this fascinating saga as it unfolds.

And now, a quick interlude.

Some quick ruminations on the meaning of a contest-winning best-of-sniper-shots-in-Halo video I’ve watched a couple times recently. I am sure that for some people, “Jason And Halo” has become that saddest of weblog tropes, the Thing That The Weblogger Keeps Going Back To That We Got The Point Already Thanks. But that said, I’m just using it as a jumping off point for a few observations. I play Halo in off-times to calm down and interact with others in some way, even if it’s somewhat sociopathic, like getting exercise by joining a rioting mob. But still, one has to at least acknowledge the work of this one:

The direct link is here, including a high definition version.

This video wouldn’t begin to be possible without the massive amount of controls and flexibility built into the Halo 3 engine – you can turn the camera around in many different ways, run the shots slow and fast, become the point of view of anyone playing, and generally have all the control a person doing a video production would ever want.  Usually, this is more useful for things like trying to figure out how someone did what appeared to be an amazing move, or to find out why you hit someone with a shotgun but someone else got credit for the kill.

This video, however, is full of all sorts of cinematic tricks that wouldn’t be out of place in a Warren Miller film, and adds a whole range of acrobatic maneuvers cutting between all different games to produce a seamless whole. The theme, as you might guess, is “sniping”, where you can use a gun to make someone’s head explode from across the game’s maps – it’s my favorite weapon by far, just for the surprise feature. Take from that what you will.

Like a lot of these films, it really helps to play the game to understand the complicated things people are doing, or how difficult it is to pull off some of the moves. I watch the X-Games occasionally as well as other let’s-put-teens-in-danger sports programs, and I am positive that my vacuum of experience skateboarding or riding motorcycles makes my understanding of what’s onscreen that much more dulled. It’s a cinematic/instructional problem, and while they make up for it with bright lights and loud music and not sticking around on one shot, I am fascinated at that issue, of making someone who doesn’t have the back-end context understand they’re watching something amazing.

Recently, I was online with a friend’s son, 10 years old, and I was showing him how to set up shots and angles in the Halo 3 theater (the replay mechanism) for maximum dramatic impact. This involved showing an establishing shot, a zoom in, and then framing the action so you saw it all, then felt it happen, and then a tracking shot into the distance, showing the aftereffect. He was in California, and I was in Boston. We did it using commodity hardware in our homes. It was distance-learning film school, damnit! Wow.

I don’t want to say that kids have it easier now, but they certainly have it cooler. With the Quake 3 engine open-source, and games like Halo giving you such amazing control to make movies… there’s no excuse to be doing film school in your house.

The Geocities-is-going-away thing broke wide a short while ago. The “Jason is Saving Geocities” thing is breaking wider by the day, so I guess we need an update.

After my initial call-out, a nice selection of folks showed up to the Archive Team IRC channel, ranging from the offering of bandwidth and disk space or simply moral support and coding. We’ve been downloading at an enormous rate, probably along the lines of a gigabyte a half-hour of Geocities, through all our different vectors.  Because we’re talking literally millions of files with an average size of 1 to 30 kilobytes, it becomes harder and harder to get a “big picture” view of everything we’ve grabbed, but after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We’re now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is that fast enough? We’ll see, won’t we.

Stuff like this filters around pretty quickly, because the concept is short (someone is mirroring geocities!) and I have an awful lot of verbiage out there about archiving and other general opinions. In other words, I know when something I’m doing gets attention because I start hearing an awful lot about King of Kong and Goatse. But let’s keep it on-point, shall we?

For all the lazyasses who are writing “I hope they back up my website too!” I can only say back up your own site, motherfucker. We’ll hopefully get it but we’re not a for-pay service or likely to be comprehensive. We’re targeting (or trying to target) sites where the persons behind them are dead or unseen for a decade, so just by saying you know of your site and are still around puts you in a lower priority.

A side-effect of the whole process is I now know way, way, way too much about Geocities than I ever expected to. We’ve had to dissect every aspect of how the site functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is hilarious, but this contextual bit is important to understanding the data we have. I’ll let you leaf off from here if that doesn’t interest you, but I want it down somewhere.

Geocities was once called Beverly Hills Internet. The company was founded in 1994 but it wasn’t until mid-1995 that they publically offered what people now think of as a Geocities trademark: free webpages, or “homesteads”.  Here’s an announcement of the program coming out of beta and being offerered generally in July of 1995.

The homesteading system is very hard to get across as a good idea, looking back, but I’m sure at the time it made sense. Instead of offering things as www.website/user or www.website/~user (which was a sign of being UNIX derived), BHI (then renaming to Geopages, later Geocities) separated people into “Neighborhoods”. You’d have a neighborhood for science fiction, for movies, for technology. Your page would join a Neighborhood and you’d stay in theme – so your page on Star Trek would go into the Science Fiction neighborhood (called “Area51″), and you’d be a number on the “block”, like 4454.  I have a document written by “Blade” in which he painstakingly overviews all the neighborhoods, when they joined the fun (Area 51 joined in April of 1996) and the “suburbs”.

Suburbs? Well, the website/neighborhood/XXXX format was limited, so they added “suburb” directories, which then had their OWN block sets. So now you had two formats; the previously mentioned w/n/xxxx format, and a new one, which would yield URLs like www.geocities.com/Area51/Neptune/XXXX.

This is how things went for the next couple of years. There were a bunch of neighborhoods, all with a pile of suburbs, and then a bunch of numbers under that for the “blocks”. This scaled oddly, but it did in fact scale.

Then Yahoo bought Geocites for $3.5 billion dollars, which sounds like one of my usual dismissive throwaway numbers, but it really was that amount. Assuming this article is at all accurate, 200 of 300 Geocities employees were laid off, payment was in cash and stock (probably mostly stock), closer to 2.5 billion, and Yahoo simultaneously announced they were going to “fix” geocities to work in the Yahoo paradigm. The founders, as usual, were given new meaningless terms in the new monolith. Who drives into work happy that they get to be “senior vice president of industry relations” instead of CEO? Man, that makes a gun look tasty. Meanwhile, the remaining 100 employees appear to have been scattered to the winds, in various sales offices and several new Yahoo office buildings. Must have been awesome.

So then Yahoo started integrating Geocities into their blorb, which I’m sure was a engineering marvel and a wonder to behold; and here we have the third Geocities URL structure: www.geocities.com/yahooid. This utterly broke the neighborhood/suburb model, although all indications are that it was starting to fall apart well before this acquisition, with the wrong types of people being slotted into neighborhoods it made no thematic sense to be in, like putting a biker bar in a gated community. Regardless, we now had three different settings, like strata in which to see the geologic time difference.

We’re pretty sure we have the first two completed. Again. WE THINK WE HAVE EVERY SITE FROM 1999 AND BEFORE ON GEOCITIES THAT WAS LEFT. (Update: My team is more inclined towards “most” than “all”.) We’re still running tests on this and likely some “hidden” material will still come to light, but we have enough that a historian could “get it” even if a completist or armchair archivist wouldn’t.

The number of total sites currently on Geocities is elusive. There were numbers bandied about between 1996-1999 of millions, with 3.5 million the largest number I could find. Bear in mind, however, that 1. Yahoo are fucking liars, 2. People who are about to be bought for billions of dollars might be inclined to be fucking liars, and 3. The press will often aid and abide fucking liars, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not. But what is definitely clear is that Yahoo purged a lot. How much, again, unsure, but we have found one neighborhood (WallStreet, ha ha get your jokes in, comedians) that is utterly empty, as well as the holiday special NorthPole.  Gone, utterly.

Others are in better shape, with hundreds or thousands of sites left in them and their suburbs. Obviously if someone jams their secret mp3 they spent 3 hours calculating in 1998 in a place nobody ever found, then we won’t find it. But generally, stuff is being found. Rsync is a huge help here; we can liberally grab crap and make it “do the right thing” against the global list and collection.

I have only the merest of time for people (some friends) going “why even try saving geocities” so let’s instead move onto the other question I’m starting to get, which is “where can I get this”.

It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I’m going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don’t see how the final collection won’t end up online, but how is elusive – maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I’ll make sure people can get it, somehow.

So there we go. It’s running fine, things are happening, and I’m sure in the time it took to write this we’ve grabbed another 5 or 10 thousand memories from the soon-to-be-gone Geocities. GO ARCHIVE TEAM GO.

So Yahoo, cowards that they are, announced in the most quiet and subtle manner possible that they were shutting down Geocities, the nearly 20-years-old hosting service and site that has been home to untold millions over the years.

I suppose I should be flattered that well over two dozen people have contacted me to ask, essentially, “Will Archive Team be trying to save and archive Geocities?”

And the answer, which I hope you would expect, is OF COURSE WE ARE. I’ve got experiments running as we speak, treating Geocities like a drunk cheerleader dropped into the excercise yard of a prison. It’s quite ugly: Geocities has this really insane thing where they only allow 15 megabytes of a website to be downloaded during a given hour, from anywhere, before that site goes “down” until the hour is up. This is playing hell with my scripts. They’ve also generally obliterated directories of users, but I have ways around that as well. In other words, the process has begun.

It’s cute and pithy to say “Well, good fucking riddance to Geocities”. And I totally understand that outlook, make no mistake. Many pages are amateurish. A lot have broken links, even internally. The content is tiny on a given page. And there are many sites which have been dead for over a decade. But please recall, if you will, that for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website. This was where you went to get the chance to publish your ideas to the largest audience you might ever have dreamed of having. Your pet subject or conspiracy theory or collection of writings left the safe confines of your Windows 3.1 box and became something you could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full color. Right now. In a world where we get pissed because the little GIF throbber stays for 4 seconds instead of the usual 1, this is all quaint. But it’s history. It’s culture. It’s something I want to save for future generations.

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I’ve archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It’s not for me to judge. It’s for me to collect.

I can’t do this alone. I’m going to be pulling data from these twitching, blood-in-mouth websites for weeks, in the background. I could use help, even if we end up being redundant. More is better. We’re in #archiveteam on EFnet. Stop by. Bring bandwidth and disks. Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.

P.S. Fuck Yahoo! We are going to rescue your shit!

I’ve been to all six Notacons and I’ve co-run all three Blockparties. This year, things moved to a new hotel and while the new hotel had some oddities and rough patches, it was so much better a place as to be a whole new event. And for Blockparty itself, my attempt to keep a North American demoscene thriving and rocking out, success could not have reached a greater level. I feel a little foolish and redundant describing the whole event, so I’ll just focus on a few things.

• I could never have hoped to see all that was going on. That’s a nice feeling.
• Notacon Radio, which I started a number of years back, is so successful and so great now I didn’t have to do a damn thing. That’s impressive.
• I lived well, ate well, and saw what I could of very dear friends. Many of them.

And who’s to argue with all that?

Oh, I suppose I’ll mine some of the scads of content and ideas I got from those special 4 days in weeks to come.  But for now, know it was fantastic.

Back in the mid 1990s, when the Emulation Craze really kicked in and before MAME flattened the playing field once and for all, we had a lot of emulators out there. Some were single-purpose: they emulated a single video game, and generally very well. Others were multi-machine, usually focusing on a set of games that used the same chip. Only minor differences were on the inside between these games, after all, beyond a feature set or two. One might emulate a bunch of Midway games; another a bunch of Atari games. It was a great time and I enjoyed it immensely. I still do.

But the best kind of new program in a field stuffed full of them is the program that solves a problem you didn’t even know you had.

Most of the emulators were dedicated to getting the ROM data from the machines to display on your computer, and take controls from the keyboard or mouse (or joystick in serial port) and do what was needed to let you play an old game. You might get a control panel screen to let you reprogram the keys (sometimes) or a set of options to scale the resulting image generated by the emulator. Maybe. But that was about it; you “emulated” the program and you were done. Onto the next project.

But not so with one emulator that quickly shot (for me) head and shoulders above the others: Vector Dream.

Now, this was an emulator that didn’t rest on its laurels with simple emulation of video games. Its chosen arena were a collection of Atari vector video games: Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Tempest, Lunar Lander, and others. You could read about the games (instructions for them were included), find out what ROMs you needed, and change the configuration of keys. Very normal stuff.

But in the rest of the configuration screens… ah, well here was all the difference. Check out these sound options:

And check out these drawing options for the vector-based games:

Do you see what I saw? Settings for deflection coil noise? Settings for glowing vector lines, settings for the buzz of the power supply? Not only that, but when I just played the emulator a bit, I noticed that the screen emulates burn-in!  The black letters from the attract screen sit in the bottom and upper left of the image, just like an old monitor. Wow.

A programmer assigned the ROMs of an arcade game who didn’t spend much time playing them might focus on getting the rendering to be “correct” and then work on the next phase. Peter Hirschberg, the creator of Vector Dream, had been living and breathing with these machines. He knew what made them special, and what part the hum of the machine’s parts played in the experience. He owned all the machines he emulated here – and he drew from real experience. This is vital to living that time and playing the game if your interest is to go beyond mere rote approximation and move closer and closer to “being there”.

Let’s be clear – I’m not turning my nose up at people who boot up MAME, bang out a few levels of PAC-MAN and get back to writing some e-mail. I’m especially not faulting or being troubled by people who take, say, DOOM and shove it on a cell phone and play it on the commute to work. Good enough! You’re playing something, and the inherent rules/experience of the game is so well-written that a lot of the experience can be stripped away and you’ll get something out of it. That’s fine.

But to have the option, the possibility, of experiencing something a little closer to what the original game was like, and having the option of adding layers of senses that you otherwise weren’t engaging by playing it online, well, then, that’s good for the sake of history. And so painless, once it’s in place.

So imagine my delight at finding that Ian Bogost, who partnered with Nick Montfort to write Chasing the Beam, that treatise on the Atari 2600 I mentioned recently, tasked some students to make Atari 2600 Emulation take another great set of strides.

In his announcement, Ian solves a problem many people didn’t know they had – emulators of the modern age render on incredibly sharp and color-specific LCD monitors, which means that we have it better and brighter than generations before us ever knew.  But it also means that the experience of an actual beam blowing across a piece of glass and lighting up the junk coated on the back side is obliterated. This is, as I just mentioned, a problem. Not a feed-the-hungry sort of problem, but  a problem nontheless. And all it took was a handful of students to begin to fix it.

Ian had these students of his construct new routines for emulating old TVs. Here’s an example of the difference between a standard LCD and the new filters:

See, in most cases, the bottom half would be the improvement – and it would be an improvement if the programmer had intended things to be seen that way. But as Ian smartly points out, this was not what the original programmers of the Atari 2600 (and other home console systems) worked with in the 1970s and 1980s. They worked with Televisions, good old moving-beam thanks-Philo-Farnsworth monsters that blurred ever so slightly and glowed when stuff hit the glass. This is the gift being brought to us.

Is it perfect? Of course not. TVs were different in different ways, the glowing was good in one set and blurred more in another.. but even the fact that we can now frame the conversation that we’d never had before is a sign of how things are progressing. The team plans to have the Stella Emulator (an excellent Atari 2600 emulator that has my name in the credits!) incorporate these new routines. And since the emulator is open source, these routines can be tweaked, modified, and imported into other emulators, or screen savers, or what have you. This is very exciting news, to those of us who get excited by such things.

Again, it’s the joy of seeing some flavor of life that is being lost returned in a somewhat sterile but still active manner – this is what saving history is about. It’s not just about words and putting every dot in the same place. Thanks, Peter, for bringing up that conversation – and thanks to Ian and his team for continuing it.

The other main “guy on stage in a room addressing an audience” presentation I did at Notacon this past weekend was a little stranger. But maybe you’ll dig it.

(Here’s a link to the page if the embedded player doesn’t work.)

Here’s how it came about.

I’ve attended a lot of presentations, watched them online and sat in person while people on some sort of stage wanted to transfer information. Some have been breathtaking and informative. The “breathtaking/informative” portion has not been a majority of the ones I’ve seen; let’s put it that way. Some of this is because I attend hacker conventions, which have a much lower barrier-to-stage than conventions where the speakers are being paid or being flown in or otherwise cared for. Sometimes people are on stage to get free tickets. Others honestly want to get information across to an audience but they focus entirely on dumping the information without considering the manner in which they do so.

I figured, what hey, my talks get generally positive marks in their realm, and I’m always into explaining things, so I offered to drop a bunch of tips on the audience, and specifically the upcoming weekend speakers, about what I knew about giving a good presentation.

I cranked on this one. I spent a lot of time collating my knowledge, and trying to make the presentation itself a good one. I’ll welcome reviews. Someone, the next day, apparently asked the registration desk where he could get a copy of the talk, so that’s nice to hear. Maybe you’ll get something out of it too.

This was recorded on an HD camera, but with no operator, so it’s OK recording, sound and video, but hardly a professional multi-camera setup. Good enough for this, though. Enjoy.

For two weeks, I was off the air as far as this weblog was concerned. Oh, but have no fear, readers… have no fear at all. I’ve been generating what might be called a “lot of content”. Today’s bit is just the beginning.

I am just back from Blockparty at Notacon, the 3rd edition, which ran from the 16th through to the 19th in Cleveland, OH.  Before I even begin to spend some entries on everything that went on, let us instead begin with a simple provision of Jason Scott presentation. This one happened at 1pm on the 17th, and concerns that most important of academic subjects, Super Mario 64 for the N64 Game System. (1996)

Here’s the direct link if you can’t get this to work or want to download it some other way.

I feel no general need to sell people on the idea of watching one of my presentations; I’m one to just link to it and let you decide if it’s worth 50 minutes of your time. For about 60-80 people, this was worth their time at the event, and I had a wonderful time explaining the history of Mario 64, talking about Platform Studies as a realm of academics, and talking about what lessons could be learned from this now 13 year old game.

My choice of talk subjects goes all over the map, but I really do think there’s a ton to be learned from this game, and the Mario series has really given us a lot to learn from, even if not everyone can get their heads around the idea.

This was just one of the things I was up to in the last two weeks. Keep tuned!

Spent a nice little day (or part of it) at XORcon, an impromptu (by most standards) conference held in an august Harvard hall, and in which a few dozen people listened to a few other people talk about a range of eclectic subjects.

I took some photos, but they’re pretty universally terrible. Here’s one to give a rough idea of the layout/room:

I was impressed with the setup of this classroom/lecture hall; everyone had their own power outlets and every seat had a microphone from which to speak into if they so chose, allowing immediately back and forth without shouting. It must have been a pretty penny to outfit this room;  I’m so used to the absolute shittiness of educational facilities that this was kind of Utopian for me.

Subject matter was varied, as per the whims of the organizers, and was single track.

Somewhere in here was Kevin Driscoll, who I met previously in various unusual places involving Mark Hosler and free culture and the rest, and who co-authored this neat little thing:

Endless Loop, a brief history of Chiptunes

I question the wisdom of an academic/historical work linking to Youtube, but for the moment all the links function, so you in contemporary time can go ahead and enjoy this spectrum of introduction to the various aspects of Chiptunes, within a videogame context.  (You might also want to read This academic paper by Karen Collins, if you’re into this sort of stuff.)

Miss Diana Kimball gave a talk on the process of archiving, about 15-20 percent of which I agreed with, and A.J. Mazur talked about the depravity of video-game game shows and portrayals of videogame competition in movies. I piped in with my usual historical blather, but I don’t think where he was going with it matched what I was getting at.

I had to leave early because of a work-related incident, which broke my heart, but I did catch part of a talk over the webcast (which unfortunately, had terrible sound and so I got none of it).

In all, an excellent day. I wish more stuff like this happened in my life.

While we’re on the subject of Flack O’Hara, he wrote a weblog entry recently about an unnecessary trip he took cross country for some training (the training was necessary but he doesn’t fly, so he has to drive the distances) and nestled amongst amusing stories of poor food, weird hotels and the experience of driving, he had this line:

Thursday after class I drove southeast to visit my friend Nick’s store, Next Level Videogames in Blackwood, New Jersey.

Here’s what Next Level Videogames looks like:

And you know I kept this entry around in my feed reader while I considered what struck me. What struck me is I fundamentally do not understand many types of stores anymore.

I may sound like I’m being dramatic, but I am not kidding here – the thread of internal conversation that would eventually lead to “and you would then fill a building with a very specific kind of stuff and wait for people to show up and buy the stuff” is one I quickly have lost.

Why have a store? Well, if you were, say, a place where you did stuff to people, like a tattoo parlor, dentist or laser-eye surgery pit stop, then yeah, you’d want this building where you go in with your equipment and wait for people to show up and do things to them. Got it.

Food, another good one. You want food, you go to a place where they cook the food and even then you probably want to dress up the food a bit, but fundamentally, hey, come get food here and we will wait for you to come get food.

Supermarkets. Mega-box stores. Got it.

But vacuum cleaners?

Why do we need vacuum-only stores? Why do we need piano-only stores? Why do we need stories with a lot of something and those stores have to wait, patiently, in one location while people come in and buy that one thing, often doing so based on a criteria not relevant to the expertise of the person?

It’s just starting to seem to desperately archaic to me. If the situation does exist, and of course it does or these places would be entirely gone, I feel like it’s some kind of charade, an agreed-upon fiction like a post-apocalyptic world where we still get “the mail” delivered because we’ve always had “the mail” and even though there’s no one left to send us mail, we still have a mailbox outside.

When the bookstores started dying in droves, some of them didn’t go into the good night entirely quietly. There was one in Boston, and I just don’t have the heart to poke them in the eye, who wrote a variety of scathing indictments of the modern era, blaming the Internet and people not knowing a good deal in a used bookstore for their demise.  I’m sure they thought they were taking a stand at the time (this was 7 years ago) but the fact is I knew this store and they were a cranky crypt of off-putting gatekeepers, scowling as they took your money for their books. A lot of stores really seem to be this way.

I guess I could see stores that have been around for years continuing along, in a sort of death march, with some specially built-up group of customers who they’ve been cultivating for a long time. Like a floating island in a desert, they are of a special time and place and will go on for a bit.

But honestly, I don’t know how someone says “the best way for me to sell this stuff is to go into a building, deal with the endless hassles in today’s over-licensed and over-regulated world, get everything working, go into debt, open the door and hope like hell I make more than $3000 in the next 30 days.” Like, now, in the present day.

I understand the romance of it. A place of your own, a store you run. But somehow, the very idea of sitting in a box somewhere deep in the middle or outskirts of a town, waiting for someone to walk in and not shoot me or just browse… I don’t get it. Not now.

Maybe someone can help me here.

Bring a vacuum.