From the mailbox:

Hello Jason,

In about a month and a half, I’ll be undertaking a video interview series of ultramarathon runners. Unfortunately, I have zero experience with both interviewing and video production. My frame of reference for beginning is your BBS Documentary. I imagine I’ll essentially film interviews in the same manner that you did, as I’ll be conducting the interviewing and filming solo.

So I’d like to ask if you can point me at anything you may have written up about your process. Or perhaps if you haven’t written anything up, can you offer any advice. I’m open to advice on any matter, such as interviewing, equipment, etc. etc.

Thanks

Bill

I’m asked variations of this a lot. I figured I’d take a shot at answering here.

You’re asking two very different questions here, not particularly overlapping, like asking how one learns to drive a truck and then asking what sort of things you would put in a truck and where to drive it.

Equipment-wise, sound is more important than video, and lighting is more important than resolution. But if you can, try to nail all these things as best you can. Currently, I tell people to buy something like a Canon Vixia, a solid-state (6 hours of recording capacity, no tape) and compact video recorder where you can record in high definition in locations you might not have been able to achieve even a few years ago. The resulting recordings can be pulled down via firewire or USB into your laptop or desktop on the road and you can move onto the next thing quickly. This has a lot of use in a lot of situations. And it’s $700 or so.

If $700 is too much money, then you are going to run into problems all along the line, so consider what sort of money advantage you have, and whether you maybe want to pair or group up with others who want to do camera stuff and buy the camera together. (Don’t make it more than 4 people or you will be miserable.)

Do a documentary before you do this documentary you’re talking about. Make it one about your house. Your house isn’t going anywhere and you know the subject well. You record the house, from all sorts of angles, and then try to put together a cohesive film from it. If you find you’re missing footage, then go back and record it (hence the advantage of doing it on your house). That’s something I recommend. If you don’t want to do that, are you prepared to drive all night to get to the homes of people you don’t know, and ask them all sorts of crazy questions, even if they’re not completely into the idea?

Here’s a little bit about my setup, which might show you some ideas. Again, my camera is much larger and nowhere near as good:

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/production/lightscamera/

You can see the thoughts I put behind it, but bear in mind I did have a rough patch or two coming up with what worked for me.

Now, the second part: Interviewing.

If you go to archive.org and listen to my raw interviews, I think you’ll find I generally start out with a simple question, something the person can answer without thinking, and have them get used to being recorded and photographed and dredging out their memories. It sounds like your documentary is contemporary, but asking simple questions will end up bringing out more complicated thoughts. The real key is to listen to the interviewees, listen for things they’re hinting at (consciously or unconsciously) and not to be afraid to ask them what they want to talk about. People are people, and everything they say to you will be what you work from, in your final film. So treat them as people, and realize they’re people.

The other non-intuitive thing is that as you do a film where you’re basing things in reality, reality might present things you didn’t expect, and I think it’s pretty important to reflect that. If everyone in your film is into rock music, or if driving electric cars is something everyone you interview does, it probably should be mentioned, even if you didn’t think you’d go that way.

In the modern world, where places to host your work (or incomplete work) are legion, you have a lot of ways to get your stuff “out”. If you’re in it to make some quick bucks, documentary films are not the way to go, unless you’re doing wedding videos.

Also, please watch as many documentaries as you can.

That’s what I have off the top of my head. Good luck, Bill.

For whatever reason, no North American Demoparty has ever survived past 3 years. That changed last week, as Blockparty hit #4.

Four years of Blockparty! Who would have thought! Well, anyone who heard me promise at the first one that we’d have five.

I do have to say, however, that things really were looking dim there for a tad. Between losing my job and the rest of life’s upheavals, I simply could not focus pretty much any attention on this event. My buddy RaD Man stepped in and whipped up sponsors, but it was just obvious I couldn’t do my usual behind the scenes work on this project. That said, we had a great invite, a great website, and ultimately, a fantastic party.

Once I got there, Notacon did its usual great job of infrastructure and support, and from all the lessons we learned last year, we had a great setup for putting all the demos and presentations and whatever else up in a very timely fashion!

Also, we had awesome releases this year, including the first Colecovision Demo released at a party. Not bad, I say.

Normally, we haven’t streamed the event, but this year Notacon increased their bandwidth, and we found ourselves with an opportunity to stream it! And we did!

So, you can relive the magic online! Check it out.

And are we doing it again? Yes, but we’re going to do it in California for Fall 2011. More info on that later in the year.

Free live streaming by Ustream

Buried in there is the entry that my group submitted, “Wyndham Reality”. Here’s that entry:

Wyndham reality will make absolutely no sense to you if you don’t know of the original it’s based off of, “Second Reality”:

While I was out galavanting, Twitter and the Library of Congress announced they were going to be archiving every single public tweet on twitter, with an embargo delay of six months. (I.e. all public tweets older than six months, going back to 2006).

Here’s my official response:

FUCK YES I TOTALLY APPROVE

Seriously, the only part of this that holds interest for me beyond the aforementioned FUCK YES is to watch the totally predictable, entirely mundane slots people fill, one by one, upon the reaction of this news.  It’s to the point that I realize a lot of bloggers are now discovering what newspaper reporters and columnists discovered centuries ago, which is taking contrarian positions and then writing for about 15 paragraphs actually constitutes “work”. If you get paid for it, hey. If you don’t, well, at least you’re gaining a few hits or feeling like you “did something”.

Let’s just get my responses to these predictable, tired, vague concerns out of the way, not that any of my positions should be a surprise.

REACTION ONE: BUT I OWN MY TWEETS (aka OMG PRIVACY)

Let’s play a ponderable. Every day, sometimes many times a day, you write something, anything, into a magic little box you keep in your pocket. This box then sends your message, you know, the one you specifically and intentionally typed in and pressed a send button to send out, off to a company’s servers, elsewhere, where you don’t even know where they are, and then they put them up almost immediately on other servers connected to the entire internet and hosted what you said for everyone to see. Now, you could also send what they called direct messages which only you and one other person saw (and of course the company could see), but you, well, your message you wrote on your magic little box was such hot pancakes that you wanted anybody connected to the Internet to see it so you put it there, as opposed to, say, under your pillow. And now, one of the most august bodies of storied knowledge and information wants to put your little public messages on some hard drives and store them inside their warehouses. And now you’re flipping out? Let me give you a handy graph of tweets per day, on twitter. Blue means total tweets, red means your tweets:

You see the red where your tweets are? No, you don’t. You know why? BECAUSE YOUR TWEETS ARE STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT. Millions of tweets a day and you’re suddenly all “but now everyone will know!” know what? That you used twitter? Well, pour me a double, because I can’t believe I’ve stumbled into someone who didn’t understand the one single aspect of twitter, of tweeting, and where they stood in all this. Stop acting like the world just broke into your dining room cupboard and photocopied the dishes. What you were doing, bonehead, was playing a part in a special time when the global conversation was directed in one place. To have the ability to pull through tweet data and show how ideas rippled through the world and what parts of the world thought what and how ideas rose and fell… well, that’s precious stuff, and yet it’s precious because it’s the greater than the sum of all the parts within it. In other words, you are both important and not important, vital and unvital. Enjoy your quantum state, kitty, before I drop something in the box with you.

REACTION TWO: WHAT A WASTE OF MONEY THAT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS IS DOING THIS

Jesus fuck, do you ever pay any attention to anything the Library of Congress does before fifteen seconds ago when you heard this news? Even in the news entry where they announce this, they mention how they collect all manner of stuff, for example, archiving over 167 terabytes of political sites of all kinds. Terabytes, people.  Why don’t you spend a nice 10-15 minutes and browse this listing or this listing and play Magic Future-Seeing King of the Pile and decide what goes and what stays? And you do know that these are a tiny, tiny sliver of what’s in the collection, right?

This is up there with the fume-huffers who have to ruin wonderful images of NASA by going “think of all the people we could feed with this money”, you know, because every time you send a rocket into space, billions of tiny strings attached to it yank sandwiches out of the mouths of toddlers throughout the third world. Meanwhile, the research, exploration, knowledge and inspiration of these projects is suddenly forgotten in this insane zero-sum game. You know, I’m not saying the space program isn’t inefficient in multiple ways, but it’s a pretty good bargain for what the world gets out of it. Similarly, archives and libraries pay huge dividends down the line –  and for not too crazy investment.

REACTION THREE: OH GOD TWITTER IS SO VAPID WHO WANTS TO SAVE THE WORLD’S BLATHER WE ARE DOOMED

Look,  twitter, for the time that it sticks around as the Hot New Thing, lowered the barrier to communication and description of the world around us. It allowed people who would never write a weblog or compose essays or even write down any of their thoughts a medium with instant gratification for putting down what they were thinking. Feedback on speeches, thoughts on themselves, and yes, ranty little nothing messages about current status and what pop stars said what and spam, spam, spam.  But it is us. It is what we are, and that’s what twitter is showing. Oh sure, take the ol’ high and mighty attitude, Hemingway, and let us know with a few sniffy little lines that your poop predicts the future and makes floors shine, but to understand how we can improve or learn how we perceive reality, we need to see what we are. Twitter might be one piece (note here: one piece) of that puzzle, of that evidence trail. WHY AM I STILL DISCUSSING THIS WITH YOU because I’m sure you’re going to come back with some informative response OH WAIT YOU FORGOT WHAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT BECAUSE SOMEONE IS WRONG ELSEWHERE ON THE INTERNET and you need to get cracking.

REACTIO

Oh never mind. Look, just study this for a while until the hurty feelings go away, and after you’re dead someone will find the tweets where you railed against this whole thing and go “what’s up with that guy?”:

It’s nice to be reminded of how many people are looking out for me and my interests.  A few weeks ago, while travelling, I got mails, instant messages, and pages that there was some sort of “BBS Game” out there, and that it thanked me, and that it was based on calling into BBSes. I thought that all sounded neat, but my game-playing time is limited, so only recently did I sit down and play it through.

The game is called “Digital: A Love Story”, and is available for free for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  And as a few people pointed out, it’s quite an intersection of the subjects of my two documentaries: BBSes and Interactive Fiction.

Through a clicking interface, you find yourself at the desktop of your brand new Amie machine, and the kindly sales guy (and I do remember these sorts of guys) provides you with a dialing program and a phone number of a local BBS. Naturally, you try it out, and you set out on quite a fun little adventure. By the time you’re done, and it took me about two hours to be done, you’ve done an awful lot of stuff, met a wide variety of people, and probably done quite the good deed or two. I’m not a big fan of spoilers or giving away too much, so to the question “is it worth playing”, I’ll just answer “yes, even if you get frustrated at various points, because it all wraps up nicely”. For most folks, that’s probably all they really need to know about the game, but I’ll add one other bit; in the game, like Gordan Freeman in Half Life 2, your character is silent, so when you hit “reply”, that’s it – you simply “reply” and they respond as if you wrote a letter or e-mail to them, usually providing the context of your reply in their responses. That may seem weird to people, and it took me a little while to catch on, but I completely understand why the author did it.

So, here’s the thing. The author, Christine Love, was born in 1989. This takes a while to sink in.

This means she was 8 years old when I decided that BBSes were in danger of not having a place on the web and I created textfiles.com. This means she was 11 when I thought, “gee, someone should make a documentary about BBSes”. By the time she’s in her teens, BBSes are a laughable joke or a fond warm memory for the vast, vast majority of people who used them – and a meaningless term, one to skip over in writing, by many others.

This means Christine isn’t writing a simulator or a documentary or a report on BBSes – she is using them as a source of historical fiction. Within a very short time in the game, stuff happens which does not generally happen on BBSes, and the interface is a ton more easier to use, and a whole other bucket of niceties and shortcuts are in effect in the program, because she wasn’t alive to experience these things. In the credits for the game, Christine thanks “textfiles.com for much valuable research” . In other words, this means she accessed textfiles.com purely as a reference library – one to gain some understanding of writing and styles and possible characters for her game. By any standard, this would mean that the black monolith of textfiles.com just sent a signal from Jupiter. The amount this makes me happy is almost beyond measure.

I’ve read occasional reviews with folks poking at this point or that point (one young scamp said the game was inaccurate because some of the messages seem “slapdash” and that “we always worked to write thoughtful messages”.. an excellent way to show their ignorance to history) and to be sure, this is not a simulator of the BBS era.  It is, as I said, historical fiction, and no historical fiction tends to be a perfect re-telling of the time it’s from, especially when it has characters in it that didn’t exist at the time being referenced. She glosses over some things and focuses a lot on others, and shows her age with “Hacking the Gibson” in a 1988-era work – but what the fuck, people. Look at me, I’m historical and archiving reality boy, and I’m telling you it’s all going to be OK, and if you’re playing the game and getting pissed at how compiling is portrayed, you are boring and I hate you.  Go be boring about something else – Christine did something great here.

I can certainly cite earlier historical fiction with BBS lore and materials – one set that springs to mind are some zine files from the 1990s in which many slavish references to 1980s BBS comings and goings are portrayed as both actual events and as the seed for fictional narratives. However, there’s only been a few games out there that have tried to capture the zeitgeist of being online, and this one took my library for research.

Could this all have been done better? Oh, sure. Everything can be done better in this world.  But the author decided to tell this story using a very fun computer interface, with you doing all sorts of computer activities to find the story, and there is one part in this game that found me dialing up a range of BBSes looking for messages, seeing if anyone had called and left something since I was last there. For a few seconds there, in other words, I was really and actually 15 again. And how much is that worth to me?

Enjoy the game.

It’s a special year in the US, with two demoparties happening, one of which is entirely new.

I’ve been radio silent about it, but Blockparty #4 is about to happen in Cleveland, Ohio, starting on the 15th of April. I would really suggest going. I’ve written a ton about demoparties and why they’re so much fun to go to, but really, you have to see it to believe it. If you’re anywhere within driving distance of Cleveland, I can’t think of a better way to spend the weekend.

An additional exciting situation is that there’s another demoparty that’s starting up this year, @party. If you live anywhere in New England, and pretend to have the slightest interest in Demos, then you have absolutely no excuse. The staff is putting together a hell of an event, with lodging included and the unique situation that harkens back to early demoparties in Europe – you know, the ones people really miss. I’m going, and you should too. It’s in June, right when the weather gets awesome, and it’s also just outside of Boston, so it’s very convenient.

Demoparties continue to be rare over here, and with this year, Blockparty becomes the longest-running US or North American demoparty, practically an institution. With @party starting up, the opportunities just multiply. See you there.

I don’t like advice given by people in the form of “I have discovered something, and woe be unto you for not following my hard-won knowledge”, especially if that form comes wrapped up by a price tag or implied sale requirement.  I won’t name entities I see who do this online and hate, because part of their whole existence has to come from people liking or disliking them, enabling them with powers, like gods.  But some of that advice these ur-gods want to sell or self-aggrandize with has at the core of it, truth, and so I will acknowledge that not posting for months on end can be murder for an audience, even ones with RSS technology for knowing I did something the near-instant I posted.

I am not a disco ball, firing weak but noticable light in many directions and making you feel I am everywhere, but leaving you with scant real light. I am a bright fucking laser that aims its shit down at something and melts that fucker under intensity.  And unfortunately, a lot of stuff I’ve been doing has just not been followed by the time available to sit down and write about it properly. And then I convince myself that improperly is not better than nothing at all, and the world gets silence. This doesn’t work either, especially when an awful lot of people donated money to hear more from me, not less.

So let me do a quick set of sketches of scenes from the past few months, many of which I’ll probably extend and expand upon in coming months.

• Somewhere in the middle of the “coin thing”, I discovered that coin companies are, generally, pretty weird. First of all, they seem to get the vast majority of business from military, specifically military units, who commemorate their times and fraternity by having custom coins made, which every member of a given group or sub-group carries to be able to flash in response to a challenge, hence the term “challenge coin”.  All the companies stress they have a veteran running the place or somewhere high up, and if you look at the sample coins, they always separate out the various branches of service so you don’t go to look at examples of Army coins, say, and gaze upon some Navy fuckers’ coins. But beyond that, what blew me away was how absolutely unprepared people are to design coins if they’re not working for a coin company. Sending in my coin design to Hollis, the awesome saleslady at the coin company that weren’t bastards, she sent it off to the art department and they totally remade the coin, making it so much better it was outside the realm of reality, that this coin might somehow be something I am capable of being in the company of, or the prime motivator of.  It looks like this, by the way:

• Just yesterday, I was looking at Foucault’s pendulum; not some idea of the pendulum but the actual pendulum, machined and polished and in a box, while another pendulum does the stunt work in front of it, slowly moving according to the rotation of the earth. I’m at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, in Paris, a place where you can find displays with Commodore 64s, Cellphones and then original printing presses from the 17th and 18th century, looking like they need merely a few operators to start shooting out pamphlets by the stack. I do history, but these people do history. I had been there specifically at 5pm for an automaton show, automatons having interest for me for a possible future documentary. I wasn’t disappointed – the operator would take specific items out of their case and place them before us, original machines to emulate birds, provide music, and move pictures, and turn them on. Sure, the entire presentation was in French, but I got it.

• Sockington is pissed beyond pissed. He wants to be anywhere but in this room, with this muslin sheet and the two strange guys and the occasional random flashes. At one point he actually bites my hand, something that hasn’t happened more than a half-dozen times in the years I’ve known him, so we all call a break. Somewhere in there, the photographers from People magazine got the best shots they could, but the photos I take of Socks are at his own leisure, taking advantage of pre- and post-meal times, when he couldn’t care less what’s up, giving him the air of regal disinterest that I think works best. Tweetie, aka Sockelganger, is more than happy to pose, however, walking straight into the middle of the muslin, flopping down, and striking a perfect profile. “Can we just use this cat?” the photographer asks.

• I have learned the hard way that a lot of the plastic boxes sold at Home Depot and Lowe’s are crap. The crush weight, that is, the number of these things that can be stacked on one another before the start to bulge or break, is about 3-4, depending on how many magazines they’re full of. After a while, I find the right box, but now I have a few dozen others that are going to be emptied or filled with very light items indeed. The Information Cube, a 40′ shipping container I now have sitting in a distant place, has a mailing label, metal shelves inside, and will become one of my central projects as I classify and make accessible the thousands of items inside. But the crush weight! Come on. I finally find the boxes I need, able to be stacked 8 high with no problem – but I may need to order them in, and nothing makes you feel stupider in this world than paying to ship boxes.

• Dozens of floppy disks arrive. Dozens of books arrive. Dozens of computers arrive. Hundreds of CD-ROMs arrive. The part of me that really enjoys sorting things is very happy.

• Walking around in the back of the auditorium, I’m wearing a Victorian outfit and studying the crowd. GET LAMP is now, among other things, a 1-hour cut of interactive fiction, and the audience is responding well. A shot comes up, one I hoped would get a reaction, and the audience breaks into applause. The year of preparation, thousands of dollars, and unnecessary drama and conflict that brought that shot to the screen was worth it.  To my great surprise, another scene later in the film gets even stronger reaction, with people talking about it for a week afterwards; I had no idea. Afterwards, I pace back and forth on stage as heroes meet their fans.

• Pundit after pundit after pundit comments on the iPad, and people turn it into a debate about functionality and freedom versus convenience and the inevitable future. I desperately want to join in, even though my contribution will be mostly profane and a minor twist on other essays (after all, nearly every position has been taken). I feel like that one kid with the broken leg who can’t follow the pied piper. However, I know I can break a few legs with my crutch, should things come to it, so I have a few kids to play with.

There’s so much to talk about, isn’t there?