I am going through a massive pile of CD-ROMs I bought on auction. For $40, including shipping, I got something like 200-300 CD-ROMs of shareware, trials, cover disks and random what-have-you.  I had another package from a contributor who sent in his collection, so the number’s probably closer to 300. That’s a lot of historical data!

This marks the big move into cover discs for me, those attached-to-the-front CD-ROMs (later DVD-ROMs) that were able to give you endless demos and promises of great games that may or may not have ultimately materialized. I didn’t go after these much initially, trying just to get all this other data up, but it’s time; many of these cover discs are over a decade old and it’d be good to get them while they’re still gettable.

The number of doubles hasn’t been so bad, and a couple weirdo random ones have shown up, stuff from mars I’ve never heard of that probably sold less than a thousand copies at best and which disappeared into attics and basements soon afterwards. That’s often where the rare stuff shows up, deep in a directory, mis-named, waiting for a robot or a really bored person to find it.

So, there I am, transferring untold buckets of data from PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, and the occasional “best of shareware we yanked from who knows where” when I found a CD-ROM, entitled PowerPak Gold ’92.

Now, what makes it is not the simplistic clip art title or the evocative name (a lot of these CD-ROMs have titles with phrases like “gold”, “power”, “amazing”). It’s certainly not the fact that it has 600 megabytes of shareware on it or that it comes out  pre-designed to be used by BBSes.

No, what makes it is that the price for this single CD-ROM is $90 dollars.

And not just in the form of a price tag stuck to the outside of the case; I mean on the top right of the cover art, the price is printed right into the packaging: $89.95. That is a lot of fucking money for a CD-ROM, of any stripe, much less one that basically has shareware on it and is composed of data taken from public sources. The phrase “highway robbery” is usually used when you have no choice but to buy and are being gouged, and that’s obviously not the case here, but still, the phrase “galactically overpriced” still applies.

I’d have probably never looked at this specific CD twice if I hadn’t seen that price up in the corner, but here I was, interested, so I started doing some research. Things got really fascinating really quickly, so here are some things for you to browse, assuming case law and pornography fall under your Interest Umbrella.

The CD is made by a company called “Florida Lion’s Den”, which I’d never heard of. But in the years since I first started textfiles.com, an awful lot of information has come online and once you get the right “trigger phrases”, searching around can yield all sorts of hits. And more every day. So “Florida Lion’s Den” came right up.

In a court case. A very interesting court case, as it turns out.

Here’s the Google Scholar version.  Either you really like reading case law or you really don’t; as someone who’s gone through the occasional lawsuit, I know enough of the language to not get floored by it and see where stuff went, so I’ll go ahead and summarize for you.

PowerPak ’92 3.0 comes out, as far as I can tell, around May of 1993. (I assume there were previous versions.) A month later, related to said previous versions, the creator of a viewer program named VPIC on there, Robert Montgomery, sends a lawyer letter to them in June of 1993. Lion’s Den ignores this letter, and Montgomery sues them in October of 1993. In November of ’93 he gets an injunction to prevent his program (VPIC) to be used on their products.

The case does not go to court until March 1995, at which point it goes before a jury. The Jury finds Florida Lion’s Den guilty of infringement of VPIC’s copyright, and Montgomery is awarded $30 for trademark violation, and $80,000 for copyright violation. Oh, and $142,000 for lawyers fees, and $6,500 for miscellaneous costs. That’s a lot of money – $228,833.34, to be exact. Naturally, Florida Lion’s Den appeals.

The appeal is finally ruled on in 1999. 1999, six years after the legal proceedings started – apparently this sort of glacial movement occurs in the courts of law, but think of how much computers and communication change between 1993 and 1999. The appeal, by the way, is denied, meaning that Florida Lion’s Den, Blaine Richard (who worked for Lion’s Den) and Rebecca Noga (Propietor of Lion’s Den) owe Robert Montgomery a hell of a lot of cash.

MONTGOMERY v. NOGA (as this case was called) is still cited in a hell of a lot of cases: check out all these hits on Google Scholar.  The killer aspect of the court case was whether Montgomery had truly transformed his shareware program into a commercial program by doing a few additional changes and declaring it copyrighted; the court said he had, even though the amount of changed code was less than 30 percent.

OK, so that’s a lot of money behind this ninety dollar shareware CD, but then the question comes of if Rebecca Noga is starving in a trailer somewhere, eyeing specials on dog food at the local shopper’s mart. Well, that’s probably unlikely.

Looking up her name shows that Florida Lion’s den is behind the Busty Babes CD-ROM series, which was a collection of photos of girls with huge racks which you could put on your BBS and make available for sale. From this, she made a lot of cash. I found an Orlando Sentinel article about her from November of 1994, a year after the lawsuit began from Montgomery, and years before she lost the appeal.

The article’s tone is interesting, because the implication is that she’s a rough-ridin’ lady who is finding herself put down by the suits: “The suits nearly put her out of business, but Noga, a motorcycle-riding, tattooed former firefighter, refused to give up.”

Now, why are the suits putting her down? Well, because her CD-ROMs had images from Disney, Time-Warner, and Playboy, among others. In other words, she was taking photos she didn’t own and selling them for money. A lot. Even though the article mentions she had to lay off half her four person staff, she mentions being on track for making a million and a half dollars for 1995. It also mentions her other CD-ROMs, including one called Ecstacy Hot Pics.

And another court case.

Now, this second court case comes squarely into my interest, because it caused me to lose an interview for the BBS Documentary. Specifically, it caused me to lose any chance of an interview for the BBS Documentary. And just talking about it makes my blood boil.

A sysop who had sold a number of adult CD-ROM was found guilty of obscenity in Oklahoma, including selling CD-ROMs made by Florida Lion’s Den. Here’s the appeal of his sentence that was denied in 1996. The sentence was for 25 years. 25 fucking years. Plus $32,000 in fines. The trial court later got it knocked down to ten years, a $2000 fine and 500 hours of community service.

Not surprisingly, when I tracked down this sysop (who ended up spending actual jail time of years from this case), he wasn’t all that hot to speak to me and my documentary. Bulletin Board Systems hadn’t really done well by him, all told. Oh, and as I found out from others, did I mention he had previously won the congressional medal of honor? Yeah, real bad character, there.

Why am I going into all this? Mostly, as I watch various issues get knocked around in the twitterverse, or the blogosphere or the whatever, there’s this sort of light banter quality, a feeling like people are just playing the part of miffed or miffing, acting like it’s all very important and lives are at stake, and yet, at the end, it’s all in good fun.

It’s not in good fun. These little pieces of plastic, these round little nuggets of history I put up on CD.TEXTFILES.COM and related materials I make available – these have some true pain behind them, actual and real pain. There are things you can do in one state or online that will get you in the fucking klink for years in another state. That Jury wanted 25 years of a man’s life because he sold CD-ROMs they didn’t like. They wanted tens of thousands of dollars from him after he got out. Meanwhile a woman stole images from Playboy, Disney and who knows else, sold those same CD-ROMs by the truckload, and made millions.

There’s some fantastic and hilarious stuff in my archives from years gone past. But not all of it is fantastic and hilarious.

Not at all.

In 2005, when it was time to do all the DVD duplication for my new movie “BBS: The Documentary”, I had to choose how many copies were going to be in the initial run.

Since I figured this was the greatest movie ever, and would sell like hotcakes, I chose a run of 4,500. 1,200 went out the door in 4 months.

I am now looking at the remaining stock: a pile of about 10 copies, and another 20 sitting in the original box. 30.

30 copies left out of 4,500! Not bad at all, even if it took a few years more than I expected.

Sales of GET LAMP helped a lot – once I created a double-pack, where you could buy the entire Jason Scott Filmography in one swoop, sales started to pick up again this year, at least a few hundred since August.

So, it looks like we’re almost out. But wait!

I can’t quite afford the money to get another batch, but a kind soul (who can choose to reveal themselves if they so wish) is covering the cost of duplicating another 1,000 copies of BBS, and will get a small consideration back for doing so (my idea). In general, it takes a duplicator about two weeks to get the whole thing through the system, and that’s all happening shortly.

The only difference between the old version and the new one will be that the disc art will be slightly different, to reflect the new run.

Think about it – thousands of people have my film in their homes, schools and libraries… that’s quite humbling. What a wonderful situation!

Here’s to many more.

Subject: I Sure Wish You Got It

In answer to your webpage: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/781

Dear Jason,

This is in regards to the lawsuit against you from Mr. Mitchell. I do not know him personally but I know the issue he is making his best attempt to correct and from reading your page I will assume that you are just simply caught in the middle. My lot in life is not to apologize for anyone but to state my case to you as a fellow internet’ers, I have sold hardware for over 12 years mainly in the VOIP realm…

I did not know that the hardware I sold oppressed Americans. Probably similar to you being ignorant of the fact that what you do oppresses the same core group of Americans. What group are you oppressing? Ever wonder why over 66 million folks do not pay taxes and for some reason the IRS just cant seem to put them in jail? I think we would both agree it’s not for their lack of determination nor want of trying…

Also, have you ever wondered why the numbers of total voters in America seems very, very low? If you put these two together, along with the fact that it’s very difficult to get the complete census reports and you may start to see the real issues, and it’s not a bunch of lazy kids nor a bunch of tax cheats. It is because both you and I have been rapped. Rapped of our Citizenship in one of the most amazing Countries that will ever be created…

You and I take our lives and the so-called liberties we have today for granted. Why am I sure you do? Because I’m one of those nuts that after 3 years working overseas and finally returning home you would have seen me exiting the airplane and bending down and kissing the soil… but even I took it for granted. I took it for granted because I turned away when someone said the words “conspiracy” and I did what they wanted.

About 2 years ago a federal reserve bank pulled my $400k line of credit even though we were making them money… Then all this other crap hit and I lost my company, so I started researching the “why would they do this?” and it lead me to our Citizenship. Get this, “Americans” are supposedly 14^th Amendment Citizens “subject to the jurisdiction” of the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

Do you think that by after being given the land of the 13 Colonies to “the People” that they would turn around and create another sovereign (king) in a Federal Government? They didn’t and they gave the individual States and the People and their Posterity all the rights and the Federal Government only 17 enumerated rights. Since the middle of the civil war and just after the federal monster took form in the shape of a corporation, that’s why you have the States losing power in the 14^th Amendment, the stacking of the Supreme Court and a totalitarian rule by the Congress… The only reason that Congress doesn’t take over all at once is because how would you get a nation to accept it, International Law to go for it, and 500 or so ego maniacs to all agree on what tyranny to levy on us or theft to commit when they already take everything under our noses by not having to report their Common Law trusts…

The 14^th Amendment did not change your citizenship if you were born in America. You actually, should not get pulled over for speeding, you should not be arrested for smoking pot, for speaking your mind or for calling the federal government a fraud… and you do not need to pay federal income tax. The problem comes with secret contracts. Entering websites EULA agreements require UNITED STATES contractual words and his lawsuit attacked that..

In the 1970’s the federal government added the zip code system… Harmless right? Did you know that the State Citizens if found to have received a piece of mail with a Zip Code on it get beat down and hauled off to jail?

So you tell me, within your EULA’s or what have you, are you restricting the State Citizen (true American’s; read the Constitution) from entering on the internet?

Sean Bennett

You can find me most nights arguing on the Craigslist Legal Forum. I’m darn near a high school drop out and a successful businessman… But in 8 months of reading and writing my Congresswoman, US Marshals, Interpol and speaking to many seniors and by buying books from the 1800’s I have found that the truth resides with these folks… Welcome to the Matrix….

From: Jason Scott

Subject: Re: I Sure Wish You Got It

hello mister crazy man. Please do not write me again, mister crazy man.

- Jason

I got this back in February from a guy named David, and David was entirely right.

I was just discussing with my co-worker that most of the good old mom and pop computer stores are now gone (having presumably been killed off by the Internet and online shopping).  Granted I’m in Albuquerque, NM and we didn’t have many to begin with but I’m sure it’s happened everywhere.  Anyhow, I definitely think it’s a worthy topic to examine.

At this point in the US, the computer store is the electronics chain big box store, with little exception. Best Buy, Microcenter, Fry’s, even Wal-Mart, Staples, Sears. If you want a washing machine at the same time as you get your laptop, or the idea of picking up a few ties and a Hawaiian shirt along with your hard drive excites you, boy are you in luck.

But obviously this wasn’t always the case – at one point computer stories dotted the landscape and had no other little clone friends dotting other parts of the landscape. I’m sure they hung out and chatted about the ups and downs of computer store ownership, but each one had its own place and its own unique character.

Most people agree that one of the first biggie computer stores was The Computer Mart, run by one Stan Veit.  Stan died earlier this year. (That obituary/rememberance is worth the read, by the way.) From that mid-1970s start, computer stories started appearing in greater numbers, selling off these awesome new machines to eager and money-waving hands. They were stumbly, strange, unique, fun, and individualistic. They hand-lettered signs, proudly put up baggies with software in them, and waited for the customers to come.

I wish they’d taken more photos of them.

There’ll always be a few of these stores around – either a community will be unwanted by the chains or the store will do things at a certain price for older equipment that enough customers will want to go there first for repairs. But the days of a vibrant, center-of-everything show of the latest and greatest coming down the way are over for them.

So thanks, David. I’ll get on it.

In October, Facebook made the announcement that you could finally export your information. Woo hoo!

What’s interests me is less how Facebook implemented the exporting (spoiler alert: so-so) than the fact that they felt they need to do this. Why did they spontaneously decide to add exporting of any fashion?

(If you want the clunky way to download the file, Dave Taylor wrote a walkthrough for it.)

My hope is that this signifies that user data exporting has started the long, arduous journey towards being Just Another Checkmark in the world of marketing and system development. A thing that you are as surprised it’s not there as you might be surprised that the HTML doesn’t work in most browsers. Disappointed, really. Tut-tutting.

I might be a bit too hopeful, of course.

Facebook itself changes interface and features utterly randomly, with no real rollout schedule beyond, well, rolling that crap out. So while it works a certain way today, it might not be there the day after. Who knows.

Export is the process of taking out the data from one entity and preparing it for import elsewhere. It’s meant, ultimately, to allow things to share.

As for how the exporting was implemented in Facebook’s little world, I said so-so and I’ll keep to that. It basically blows out all your photos and creates a bunch of HTML versions of your wall and a couple other items. You don’t get your contacts list, you don’t get any indication of how far back it goes (I found it arbitrary what got saved and what didn’t), and you certainly don’t get it in a format that could easily be imported anywhere else.

But at least it gets out of the walled garden in one form or another. And that’s a good first stumbling step, by Facebook standards.

Huzzah.

OK, so CD.TEXTFILES.COM is such a wild, insane success that I’m starting to think I need mirrors.

Right now, the data’s only in two locations, and I don’t like that. I’m going to make it three, shortly. With over 350gb of data in over 3.3 million files, it’s a lot of data.

But what data! Old games, programs, writings, lists… it’s an amazing collection, one of those investments that’s paid off for me a thousand times over.

There’s a pro-side: all this history is right there. And there’s a con-side: all sorts of scum-sucking sites directly hot-link to the cd.textfiles.com server, surrounding the links with advertisements.

And then there’s a huge pro-side again: it’s a library that essentially runs itself.  I track down the data, and it just… goes up there.

I’m about to take delivery of over 300 CD-ROMs to add to it. It’s going to get really big.

Who wants to step in to mirror? It’s time.

OK, let’s begin by establishing some things.

Currently, by the standards of independent (actually independent) filmmaking, I’m fucking Steven Spielberg. I’ve made two films, BBS and GET LAMP, which are not even films – one is a box-set miniseries and the other is actually three documentaries combined with a coin. They’re films++, a reflection of various childhood influences which I will go into shortly. The two films have grossed (versus netted) six figures apiece. I am my own distributor. I am my own agent. I am my own packaging and art director. My subjects are specific and niche and in both cases, the films stand as the defacto baselines of the cinematic meditations on the subject. I am, by most standards, a wild success. Therefore, if I’m saying anything now, I’m saying it within the guise of the guy who has actually succeeded at making independent films.

And let me make clear, independent using the word independent and not the bullshit term Independent which means “we want to be just like Hollywood but Hollywood won’t return our calls so we’ll just be assholes by our own selves and WOO HOO HOLLYWOOD CALLED SEE YOU SUCKERS”. I’m afraid to coin a new term for people who are making films who are not part of some vast Hollywood-wannabe network, because then that will be used. So I’m saying I’m that independent where you are literally just some person with a camera and a computer. And you make a movie or something. That one.

Here, then, are my predictions for the coming years:

• It will be strange to buy physical media for your entertainment by 2013.  Strange like buying a CRT TV for your house, or buying vinyl records. You will do it, because you’re of a certain type, but you will be in a fun little minority and it will be an effort to acquire the physical media. Right now, it’s just annoying. Within a few years, it’ll be pretty strange. Eventually it will be totally weird.
• There will be a relatively small number of networks for distributing entertainment media to stuff. Probably not more than a dozen, and #11 and #12 will be like visiting the Mojave Phone Booth.
• These networks, by and large, are going to fuck the media creator, hard. I mean, really, really hard. Left with boxer shorts in mouth up against a dumpster hard.
• To survive, films that are not locked into these networks in some way are going to be even more pathetic and desperate than they are.

Let me quickly jump back to how I make films, which are a very specific way and which either gives me some authority or diminishes it, depending on your point of view.

I make extremely geeky films that take years to craft that attempt to be exhaustive, human-oriented narratives brought out of countless interviews of technically-astute people.  Not content to merely assign a bunch of pre-fitted spoken narrative from an announcer over slowly-moving slides, I attempt to bring in the voices and the accompanying material a sense of what caused this event or subject to happen.  I leverage current technical limitations to make very large bodies of work, in the multiples of hours in length, and provide them as a finished, massive package which itself is an integration of the values and themes of the subject.

That has the potential to sound like crap to people, but it’s what I’d put at the bottom of some statement when I was required to make a statement. Now let’s rip it apart.

Because I have a strong sense of wanting a range of voices, that means I have to travel and interview those voices, i.e. people. Because I want to integrate all their speaking in a way that makes sense, it ends up being many months of editing (BBS was roughly 10, GET LAMP roughly 9) to get things to just “work” like they do. And because I have some sort of weird attitude about craft, the packaging for these finished works is borderline insane in terms of quality.

When the price of the most recent film, GET LAMP, came out ($40, plus shipping), a wide variety of people responded negatively. I’ve saved a few for your edutainment.

• “45 dollars? What if you just want to see the documentary, not experience it and get all sorts of swag? To someone who is just interested in documentaries about gaming, and not specifically text based adventures and ridiculous swag, this is sort of a slap in the face.”
• “That is great, but what an evil price tag. It is likely to eat me.”
• “it’s a ridiculous price point, basically begging people to pirate it”
• “I have no idea who this dude is – I’d probably give it a shot for 4/5 bucks for an online rental but at $40, I won’t even consider it and will have forgotten it exists by tomorrow, which is a shame”
• “I can appreciate attention to detail but who would want to watch something that long? On a subject like BBSs and Text based games? Guy needs to hire an editor to reign that shit in”
• “$45 = blow me”
• “Ouch. Geez. I was really excited about this, but not really $45 excited. Maybe in a year or so they’ll release a coin-less cheapy edition.”
• “I might be willing to pay a small fee for a downloadable version, but $40 is kind of insane.”

I have to point out these are real, from forums, and every single one was written with absolutely no knowledge of what the final product would be; they came out months before the movie was ever released.

Instead of coming into their homes at night to strangle them (and at least three have double-bolted windows, so what’s the point), I’m mostly bringing up this collection of saucy quotes to point out what’s going on here: the film, the idea of film, is rapidly becoming devalued. Not just devalued; decimated.

A lot of people talk about Netflix like it’s the natural place for this to all end up. If they don’t want a copy of BBS to pay for and watch, they’ll just “wait for it to come out on Netflix”. After watching dozens of people say this, along with accompanying language, I’ve determined a lot of people don’t understand what Netflix is anymore. They think it’s some sort of iTunes. It’s not iTunes. iTunes is a whole different set of problems, but iTunes works by a royalty system – Netflix most certainly does not, unless you’re in such a huge position as a film library that Netflix has nervously sent some people over to your office to negotiate with you. Netflix is not sending anybody over to the TEXTFILES.COM offices to negotiate with me.

Should BBS ever end up on Netflix, I will get $40 for each copy they buy, and then I will never see money from it again. That people would think that a $9.99/month fee to Netflix (now less than that for a streaming-only license) is somehow imbued with royalties, that somehow that tenner gets split among the dozens of films you watch that month, strikes to me at the heart of what’s going on –  a greater and greater insulation of cost versus value.

I am at this point convinced that a large amount of audience have little or no idea of what it costs to make a film. I’ve encountered folks who literally think the cost is the physical media of printing the DVD and the packaging, and if they download a copy at zero, my costs are therefore zero, and we’re quits. I’ve been informed what my movie should cost and the next set of calculations are based on that should. And I’ve encountered a lot of strange ideas over what exactly constitutes a fair price – and the crime I am committing not holding to it.

And can you blame people, when movies are available for $2 or a game goes on sale for $1 or entire albums are handed away for free? It’s nice and all, and the buffet is delicious, but the result is that an actual piece of work that represents years of effort ends up providing a ball-smack-level of sticker shock.

So the two solutions are obvious. Make no profit, or make shittier movies.

Here’s a good place as any to give you this letter. It was sent to me; not written as a “open letter” or as a thinly-veiled reference to me or on some message board deep out of site behind a registration-only wall. This was written specifically to me as the filmmaker.

Just thought I would shoot you an email letting you know in my opinion 45 dollars is way too much money. You know this will be up on TPB with high rez scans of all the feelies and crystal clear copies of the films within the month. You even have an account on there, so you know it will happen. I love Infocom games, and I love text adventures, and this documentary sounds amazing. Yet being a young kid on my way off to college I have no way to justify buying this product for 45 dollars. I’m really sorry, but I felt since I cannot afford to monetarily reimburse you, I would express my appreciation and thanks at you creating such a labor of love. Hopefully one day I will see it (it hasnt been seeded just yet) but until then, thank you very much and hopefully there are more deep pocketed IF fans out there than cheap college bound kids. My recommendation is that you make just the film a free download, provided you donate at least 5/10 dollars through paypal, and then leave the “deluxe elven quality” package at 45 dollars (one in which no grues were harmed in the process of filming of course). I, being as cheap as I am, would even donate and I feel that a lot more people would too. Look around for articles about your film and the comments invariably say that 45 bucks is too much. For a documentary about a genre of gaming in which the only simple and complete way to get copies, of more than the most mainstream of titles and in modern day formats, is through pirating the Unofficial IF collection you must know most of your audience today will be familiar with torrenting. I really hope you make some money off this and I really cant wait to see it, but for $45 dollars I will wait. Best of luck and sorry to chew your ear off!

You’ve got to really put this one up on the lift and root around under it to see where it is coming from and where it’s trying to take me. Again, this was sent directly to me, an education from someone half my age explaining how the world works; he felt I needed to understand this, this idea of what things really “cost”. His business model, a sort of begging freemium, is well established and predates him by a while, but his interest in me going that way is by explaining to me, in no uncertain terms, that not only should I do it this way, that if I don’t, I will be pirated. (As a side note, a high-res scan of the gold coin is not yet as good as the gold coin, but he seems to think otherwise.)

I am less specifically interested in the kid himself than what he represents – an idea that things are inevitable, that films of a specific quality just happen, that they should all go to a $5/$10 optional payment, and it will all work out, like a game of Super Mario Brothers. That in a world where you “will” end up on The Pirate Bay, that people will gravitate towards payment regardless, and not just consider your work a part of the background, another thing to play for 15 minutes until moving onto the next shiny button.  I think he’s right that I am going to encounter more and more of his type, who do not just consider these works to be side-effects of the ecosystem of technology, but not, in the greater sense, worth any more than anything else. A movie as ringtone; a song as system beep; a book as forum post.

We did this already. His name was Roger Corman.

Roger Corman made (and makes) shit films. They are shit. They are truly, honestly, shit. That they occasionally are not shit is mostly a result of several factors not related to the making of the movie. Any aspects in which they are not shit, such as the director or the actors or crew, quickly abscond to greener, non-shit pastures as soon as is feasible. He was/is a leg up into a tough industry, but a could-die-anytime car is a leg up into moving to a new city, and not what you want to be driving around once you’re in that city. So again… shit.

But what they also were are cheap. Super cheap. Cheap cheeeeaaapppppp, re-use paper plates and wash plastic cutlery cheap. Films shot in 2-3 days. Shot for less than fifty thousand dollars. One of my favorite Corman tricks is to place a camera in an open space and film four scenes, one after another, by turning the camera 90 degrees between takes. You end up, inevitably, with four different backgrounds and the setup time is trivial. You get things done in 12 hours that used to take five days.

This is an environment where great stuff can happen, to be sure, but it is also a place where you are guaranteed a lot of excruciatingly awful stuff will happen. But goddamn, that stuff is cheap. Sell that for five bucks a head and you’ll not lose a dime.

What I’m saying is, if you degrade the meaning of media to the point that you expect, nay feel the need to write the filmmaker should he decide to charge for his work, you will get Roger Corman. You will not get me. If you get someone like me, you will get one film out of them, one that cost them a lot of money but which they are very proud of. But they won’t be able to go another round – there’s no money to do it with.

If I sound like the cantankerous old guy in this entry, I’m sorry. I go out of my way to be upbeat about the whole thing, about all the good stuff done and when amazing things happen and when I see brilliant work out there. I’ll bring you news of cool stuff where the cost is free to you; just go watch this short documentary film.  It’s great! It’s beautiful! And it’s free!

But it’s 8 minutes long. It has one person talking. It brings in absolutely no money for the creators, and it may or may not ever have a follow-up.  It certainly has little chance of ever seeing a DVD, or getting subtitles, or bonus features provided for you.

But it’s free.

Welcome to the future.

I’ve gone on about how fantastic Jamie Zawinski’s chronicles of taking over and renovating the DNA Lounge are.  Besides his unflinching of the ups and downs of renovating the club, and his deliciously nasty reaction to the status quo of licensing and politics surrounding entertainment in a city reknowned for being open-minded and supposedly free, he has a great sense of historical context.

From the beginning, he was trying to track back what came before, why his club was where it was, who owned it, who ran it, what functions the building held. Through the lens of his current ownership, he traces his place in the world. He finds old blueprints,  old news stories… whatever makes sense.

The DNA Lounge came into existence in 1985, many years before Jamie bought it. And like any club, they had shows. And like any club with shows, they had flyers.

Jamie recently found some.  He’s put them up here.

Flyers are a very specific thing – they’re meant to be self-contained invitation and news capsules, jettisoned out into the world to drag people somewhere they weren’t thinking about going to. In a world of weblinks, these are notably different – weblinks just send you to the thing in question (although of course, a weblink can lead to a flyer). With a flyer, you have to both attract the audience without overflowing them with information. Especially if you’re talking about a place to come drink and dance. So they’re compact, but alluring. Intense, but easy. They have to balance all these factors, while still ending up who-knows-where to attract the audience.

But as an aside, they also show how far short-run printing has come.  In 1986, his flyer archive has an image like this:

Composed from photocopying a bunch of cut-out printed papers and photographs, this flyer is a single color (black, with colored paper to get the effect) and obviously came together rather quickly.

Contrast with this image, created a few years later in 1991:

And then this 2002:

There was a joker in every crowd.  I use the word “joker” because the jokers traditionally have thin defensive skin and calling them what they are instead of Jokers gets that hurt look I don’t need on a night of triumph.

All the nights were nights of triumph on the JET LAMP tour, by the way. I had crowds as small as 4 and as large as 100, and they all had high points and low points, and I think it was a great couple of months. But there’s always the Jokers. The Jokers would always ask questions that were more about the Joker than the film they just saw, like commenting on how everyone had beards, or glasses, or thought some people weren’t dressed for the occasion. A couple would be more cutting, regarding possible proclivities or social skills of an interviewee, as if you could tell anything from this footage about the interviewee’s life as it was currently lived.

But one question would pop up in various ways and in its boat of shallow judgmentalism showed a greater, more interesting situation.  So I’ll discuss that.

The question is, “Where Da Women At?”

At this point, for both the documentaries/sub-episodes and a variety of other projects, I’ve interviewed about 320 people in the realm of computer history. Some of them have been impromptu and short, and others have been two-day affairs requiring lunch breaks and discussions over said lunch on how to address all the issues raised. I have done a lot of interviews. I have planned them. I have sought them out, and I’ve certainly been there for choosing who gets interviewed and what.

Gender, race and income level does not come into it. I promise you. I do not sit around getting calls from women involved in computers and quietly pressing 9 to delete the voicemail or hitting the d key on my cellphone mail client to push these unwanted females into the bin. Does. Not. Happen.

My films have primarily been about events happening in the 1960-1990 computer era, with a few references to “modern” iterations of the subject. In doing so, there’s a simple, basic fact:  Less women used computers back then. I had less of a pool of women who would ever potentially contact me or be contacted about my documentary, and so if a guy turned down my movie (and many did) then it was less destructive to the quota of male interviewees than it was to the female ones.  In fact, if I couldn’t interview someone male of a certain stature or position or historical significance, finding someone who could answer the same questions or be the same voice of authority was, more likely than not, also going to be the same gender.

So up to this point, you and I are both probably on the same page and thinking of it all in the same terms, so you then make the expected point. “But Jason,” you say, “that’s understandable given the circumstance, but we’re much better now, and getting better.” Better, in this case, means “more women in engineering” and, ostensibly, “less women being shunted aside on the basis of gender”.

Yes. Cognitively that’s true, but in actuality the situation is not worked out and it is still in effect. It is still weird, in some ways, to see really kick-ass women engineers aggressively innovating and being at the lead of a team doing engineering problems. It is made note of, or light of, when described. For a fun hour, go ahead and see how Google VP Marissa Mayer is mentioned and described in press.

But before we get off track onto quotas and pointing out the obvious, here is the specific sound bite I started using at the end of the GET LAMP tour answering questions about why there’s not more women in GET LAMP:

“Until mom and dad stop pushing little Suzy away from the Tonka Truck and towards the Barbies, my technical documentaries will not have a lot of women in them.”

Less of a pool of women in computer subjects mean less of a pool of women who might really excel in their field or get on the radar of “person you need to ask about X” when I’m doing a film about Y where X plays a part.  It means that just like expert rock climbers are generally going to be in very good shape, engineers who are getting major attention or innovating in a hugely public way are going to be men, and so on.

But this isn’t even what I really wanted to talk about.

The whole entry to this point is basically obvious stuff. You can feel good that you’re following along.  Here’s something I’m encountering that is not so obvious.

During my last DEFCON speech, I said that “being a historian means being a hater of all things”. By that, I mean you watch the same patterns happening again and again. You see patterns of people pointing out patterns of things happening again and again. Once you see it, you start to go a little crazy because you realize how futile a lot of action is in terms of using cold, simple logic to manipulate choice.

So the pattern I now see, more than ever, is that people who live in a certain period of time start to evoke their own values on the previous eras and are shocked or disappointed or ignorant that the era is going to maintain what happened back then regardless of what happened later. Need it easier? The present, which is past’s future, is perennially disappointed in the past’s inability to incorporate present’s values.

It’s been a while since I’ve written in this weblog regularly, so I won’t get too meta on you, so let’s go back to brass tacks/reality: in general, in the computer industry, at least up into the 1990s, if you were a woman and you walked into an engineering section, you would more likely than not be asked to get the coffee.  Or, if you were in a meeting, be asked to make copies for the team. You might make noise about it, sure, and if you really got loud about it you could be sure that you’d sure not be getting any damn coffee or copies for anybody again, but you were still in an environment where you were not putting up with that crap, not where that crap was, itself, something that you shouldn’t have to put up with.

You can scream at me for weeks about examples of women engineers, architects and technical folks who are out there, but find me one without the stories, the stories of what the guy engineers were like when they got there, or the first promotion into management, or anything where they excelled in the sea of norms. It was a weird situation for people, and while things got less weird quickly for individuals, it is still a weird situation.

As society moves along in its floppy, messed-up way it does and it always has, maybe Suzy will get the Tonka Truck or the Adafruit kit for her birthday. And maybe there won’t even be a low grumble on the side from other family members as she pushes the truck around or reads the instruction manual on how to make a Mintyboost. But that’s not happened yet. Not really. I’ve got hundreds of cites of women in technical fields covered with some sort of reference, oblique or joking or self-aware or subtle, along the lines of “and she’s a woman”.

I can’t do anything about this. It is a fact. If I keep making documentaries taking place involving computers and engineers and especially if I focus pre-2000, it is going to keep happening. There’s no agenda. There’s no intent. There’s no overarching aim here. It’s what happened.

Next question, Joker.