But most crazily, I wanted something included in the packaging, some nice item that came along with the DVD set and which harkened back to the “feelies”, included items from early text adventures (like a cloth map or glow in the dark rock) that really brought the whole thing with you.

I decided to go with a coin.

It turns out that making a coin, especially one that is made of multiple metals and which has a really nice finish, is a rather expensive proposition. The coin that came with the package was half the material costs – the packaging and DVD duplication and plastic wrap made up the other half. That’s crazy.

But let me tell you, it sold the package. I think we’re basically out of the realm of physical copies being the dominant way to buy items. People want to download or stream or otherwise not get a “thing”. The people who want a “thing” want that thing to be as nice as possible, but their numbers are shrinking.

About 3,800 coins went out. (The others went to interviewees and supporters and friends.) These coins meant things to people – they have been kept in wallets, put up on shelves and walls and keepsake boxes, and I occasionally run into someone who is able to pull one out and show me in no time. I am glad they had that effect on people – they were fun to make.

One last shout out to the amazing company that did them for me – Monterey Coins and their top-notch sales contact, Hollis Fulmor. I was walked through the whole process, we came up with the design together, and they just did a spectacular job with them – the detail is incredible.

Thanks, coins.

This leaves about 1,000 copies of GET LAMP to put out into the world.

To help calm the sadness and nostalgia, I’ve gone ahead and dropped 25% off of GET LAMP (and BBS Documentary, as well). My physical packages are now $30 apiece. If you go to the GET LAMP Order Page, you can pick them up as a double pack, with combined shipping.

This is not a light decision. International orders are half my sales. But I have to do it.

So, here’s what’s been happening on the back end for a while: people order one of my documentaries, GET LAMP or the BBS Documentary. About once a week, when I have time, I ingest all the orders, print out labels, put them on packaged boxes for the documentaries.  If they’re domestics, that is, US-bound, then I have a nice stack of them in a box ready to go.

If they’re internationals, well, depends. If it was a couple months ago, I would fill out a relatively simple form, a one pager, that stuck to the box as well. I could print out the label for myself and the recipient, fill out a couple blank spots, and then it was done. I would then take these two sets to the post office locally, where I’ve built up a nice relationship with the gang, even waiting to the side if the lines are long, and then sending out my own set when the place would die down. Out it goes, everyone’s happy.

I knew I was on borrowed time with that simple green form – my post office buddies told me it’d been phased out for another option, and it was just usual post office overlap letting the “old” form still be valid when they wanted the “new” form. I asked if the new form was easier. The look in their eyes….

In January of this year, the Post Office changed their international (and other rates). And by changed, I mean jacked up beyond belief. A DVD box that cost me $9 to ship is now $15. Some of them are higher. or equivalent where they used to be $8. I used to have a flat shipping rate for “internationals” and let it eat into the price. Now it basically devours the price. And the form that the post office people warned me about is definitely up to its reputation, because I can’t use pre-printed labels anymore – I have to sit there and write on multiple copies (the pens don’t really go through worth a damn) and there’s much more to fill out.

I do not want to bore you with endless details about the research I did to show that it’s now intensely difficult to send all this out. I do not want your brilliant suggestion of how I can save money with all sorts of tricks and traps to sneak around it (media mail doesn’t work that way for this stuff, other services are just as onerous, and I’m not interested in working with ‘a guy’ in Europe). I’m telling you that it’s over – the problem isn’t that I can’t probably hack some solution together that makes it merely a time-sink and trap-filled – it’s that with all my duties at the Internet Archive and all my other projects, I just can’t devote hours to this packaging.

And it’s not like it’s the image of Good Ol’ Jason working on these documentaries in his spare time anymore. I get yelled at for not having tracking numbers, for it taking a week to get to people (or longer, as per the delay in doing internationals). People think of it as a business that’s just shipping out documentaries. Parts of my life are slipping because of this time sink. Something has to give.

What does this mean going forward?

First, again, no international orders. Those are leaving the order pages today.

Second, for the last year or something I’ve been predicting where things are going in the future for my next documentaries. The answer is going to be REALLY super deluxe packaging, like in the $100 range, that’s a physical product, or digital download/streaming. In other words, a push to the extreme ends, instead of a somewhat expensive nice package. People who want something in their hands will get it but it’ll be pretty costly, and most will not want that. The others will get digital copies, and those will be pretty low cost and available quite freely worldwide. I knew it was coming, and I’ll be refactoring my current films this summer to fit that new paradigm. And the new ones will have that regardless.

So there you go.

I expect to answer lots of e-mails going “WHY DO YOU NOT SHIP INTERNATIONAL” and “WHY CAN’T YOU SHIP TO CANADA AT LEAST” and so on. Hopefully this entry will be something I can point to.

Do I like this? No. Am I proud of it? No. But it’s reflection of where I am in my life right now – my inbox is FILLED, BURSTING with people asking me in the role I play at the Internet Archive and Archive Team to help them with projects and research, attend conferences, provide consulting, and save materials both physical and digital. That’s what needs me. Being The World’s Worst Amazon Seller is not the best use of me.

I’ve sold many thousands of these things. I’m sure I’ll sell a few more domestically and I’ll always endeavor to have some on my person at all times to be able to do transactions in person.

But it’s over. Internationals are done. Please forgive me.

In short summary, I have done that.

Thanks to the additions of the Shareware CD Archive, the TOSEC archive, the FTP site boneyard, and the Disk Drives collection, and the encouraging of the hosting of the Classic PC Games library along with the (in-process) integration of Fileplanet…. The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world. Find me someone bigger.

Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 years is settling in. But since software is just that, programs and materials, it’s best to have some documentation and writing regarding it as well.

I’m well along on that too: the Computer Magazines collection is well over 10,000 individual issues of computer magazines and journals. If they’re not magazines, they might be newsletters and there’s a Computer Newsletters collection for that, with thousands of THOSE issues as well. Or books! Maybe you’re looking for books and in the Folkscanomy project, I’ve set aside a section just of computer books. Obviously there might be some hardware issues or information you would need, so be aware the Folkscanomy collection has an electronics section that veers here and there into the computer and programming realms as well.

No, no, SIT DOWN. I’m not done. The mirroring of the amazing Bitsavers Project means that over 25,000 documents that group have been digitizing for almost 20 years are right online, readable and downloadable at a whim. I’ve been separating them into company type, but I currently do that by hand so it’s uneven. Either way, an automatic process now does the ingestion, meaning anywhere from 10-100 new documents enter that library a week.

Regular ephemera? I’ve been doing a little of that on the side and working with people. It’s called the Reader Service collection. Gems aplenty there, I can promise you.

So, between all this material, and much more is coming in, the Internet Archive gives you unrestricted access to the largest collection of computer history and software in the world, bar none. Bar none.

So what’s the problem?

Well, our metadata is shit, I can tell you that. We’re not good at having all the careful twee metadata entry that most archives and libraries demand. If you look at, say, the Apple I manual we have online, it’s kind of just that – an Apple I manual. Not much detail, page listing, context. It’s just there. Preserved, easily accessed, easily read – but not described all that much. That’s a thing. People in more formal disciplines might call that a showstopper. I call it a minor issue for the moment, but one worth improving.

The other weirdness is that a lot of material is inside other archives that have to be browsed using the Archive.org’s file browser. So here’s some examples: The insides of a DOOM Level CD-ROM. A view of the entire software output for the Colecovision. The racy insides of the Devil’s Doorknob BBS. There they are, but you have to do a little digging.

Yes, this is a crate digger’s paradise. The cries of “Look what they had, they didn’t even know they had it” should echo through these stacks. The superior feeling of being the first to find a rare demo of a game that nobody ever ultimately released. The citation you note deep in an advertisement in a computer magazine for a promised hardware family that never came to fruition, or did with radically scaled-back qualities. It’s in there.

But these are problems of effort, not of possibility. That’s all they are.

More importantly, here’s the question I now ask the culture, the world, the people who might read this or get pointed to it.

Are you ready for this? Are you in?

What I mean, is that for well over 20 years now, I’ve been in the world and the culture of the software collector, the curator, the theorist, the fan. That is my life, to have been part of this group. Some of them have gone into some very professional circles with this hope in their heart to bring something like this around, but an awful lot of life and fear and reality has gotten in the way. A lot of people are well on their way towards these goals, to have this much online, this much available, this much right there and allowing us to do the Next Steps.

Well, we’re here. Now what.

There is now a fully-accessible, worldwide-reachable, massive-bandwidth and completely unrestricted collection of computer history up right now, in these collections I’ve just mentioned. Some are mirrors of incredible projects that have been around long before this moment, and let me not diminish their continued work. But some of these efforts needed that little extra bit of access, that ease of reading and downloading, and now that is here. The URLs on archive.org are designed to be permanent. This link to a little running cat (NEKO, which has been around since Macintosh days) will, barring incredible disaster, be around for a very long and dependable time. So will this collection of 30 gigabytes of Amiga software. And notably, over 360 people have downloaded that 30 gigabyte collection, absconding like Bilbo Baggins out of the mountain. Fine! Enjoy! Have a great time! But the point is, if someone asks for where it came from, they can point right here, and here it is. In a library. Online, like it belongs.

So where are you?

Where are the students of computer history who needed primary source material, downloadable images and PDF files of every description from which to make their thesis statements and reports?

Where are the bloggers and essayists who are putting together in-depth, critical, long-reaching and ranging assessments of historical events to provide context to today?

Where are the people dedicated to busting some of these lame-ass software patents that have clogged and destroyed so much innovation, all in the name of some corporate worship that says that someone patenting breathing oxygen is helping the world improve?

When do I get to see the brilliance of works like this that shed amazing new light into these old things?

This is it, folks. This is the ideal world I’ve heard whispered about, referenced, and planned for a very long time. It’s here. I know you might have expected it to land with an earth-shattering boom but it was a slow and steady flowering on the Internet Archive’s servers. The Archive of Historical Computer Software is here, and it is very, very large.

Blow me away.

In February of 2012 (be sure you read that correctly, 2012), I attended a screening of Linotype: The Film at the Typekit offices (now fully owned by Adobe). We were shown this excellent film, itself full of life and wonder and history. I was entranced, and delighted someone had gone through the effort to make a documentary on this subject.

At the back of the room, after the screening, members were encouraged to purchase copies of the film, with a standard and deluxe edition available. Naturally, as I like to have unique things, I ordered the deluxe edition. At that point, the deluxe edition did not exist as a product and we were pre-ordering. It was $75.

Later, a photo of the deluxe edition was made available. It would look like this:

The description was similar to this, while it was still up for sale: “This deluxe case is hand-made by film participant, Davin Kuntze in Brooklyn, NY. Limited to 100 cases, we only have 6 left for sale. Using the highest quality materials, this deluxe case will sit on your shelf proudly. Included in the case is a brass matrix and a slug of Linotype type that says “Linotype: The Film 2012″ along with the DVD.”

In December of 2012, apologies were made for the delay in getting the Deluxe edition out the door. I’d already bought the “standard” edition at this point. It was now 10 months past the ordering date. They’d informed me this by e-mail, by the way.

In February of 2013, I went to New Zealand for a few weeks. While I was there, the case was delivered, but as they’d put a delivery confirmation on it, the case was bounced and a “your package was not picked up” was left for me. I didn’t find this slip of paper in the pile of mail until March.

Finally, I wrote to ask them to send it again.

This is what I got back:

From: Doug Wilson <doug@onpaperwings.com>
Subject: Re: Linotype: The Film Deluxe DVD Cases Have Shipped!
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 14:21:31 -0500
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason,

Thank you for your email.

Your Deluxe DVD was returned to us as "undeliverable" in early February 
and we did not have any other contact information for you to try and get 
it to a new address.

We waited over a month to hopefully hear from you, but we then sold the 
Deluxe case as it was not claimed. I'm very sorry to say that we are 
completely sold out of the Deluxe cases.

I would be happy to refund your original $75 payment via a charge back 
to your card (I would need the last 4 digits of the card and card type) 
or via PayPal.

Again, I'm very sorry this happened.

All the best,

Doug Wilson
Director & Producer
"Linotype: The Film - In Search of the Eighth Wonder of the World"

http://www.linotypefilm.com

Let us contemplate how the sky looks in Doug Wilson’s world.

If someone gives you $75, speculatively, and then you sit on that money for a year while you get your act together with your craftsman, and then when you mail it you run into a standard, old, run of the mill issue with postal mail, that gives you the right to just go ahead and resell that item.

Never mind it’s a severe limited edition. Never mind that you had the e-mail address of the person and didn’t request a follow up. Never mind that you could probably be assured that someone who gave you $75 and whose address you had, and who didn’t raise a fuss for the year you took to deliver, was probably a bit of a fan.

No, you get to just go ahead and dump that shit to the next person to wave the money.

When GET LAMP was funded due to people giving me $50 in 2006, and the movie came out in 2010, I mailed out the promised packages from that club. Those packages all got delivered, except a small amount.

I still have those packages, three years later.

They are sitting in my storage unit, as I try occasionally to track down the people involved, and get their attention, and see about them getting their promised edition, that they paid for 7 years ago.

Because that’s what you do.

Unless you’re Doug Wilson.

Don’t be Doug Wilson.

Hello, everyone. My name is Jason Scott, and my position is “free-range Archivist” at the Internet Archive (archive.org). I’m here as a private individual, and not as a spokesman for the Archive in any way.

I’ve been working there for about two years and have used them and interacted with their staff for significant years before that. I’m now a full-time employee and have been busy bringing in several hundred terabytes of data into their stacks. Along the way I’ve been adding all sorts of material, ranging from videos, magazines, and books, all the way through to software, website snapshots, and scientific papers.

However, my main interests in life seem to center around computer history, especially home computer history of the 1970s and 1980s. To that end, I’ve made a documentary about computer bulletin board systems, as well as a documentary on text adventures. I’ve uploaded most of the raw interview footage of these films to archive.org as well.

As a few people noted here (and elsewhere), I’ve begun uploading collections of program images named in the TOSEC format to archive.org. These are being added as large ZIP files, which works better among the archive.org item framework. A .ZIP browser built into the system allows per-image references. A good example of this system in place is here: http://archive.org/details/Camputers_Lynx_TOSEC_2012_04_23

In the case of these items, I’m standardizing on the date of the set for that platform, with this first set being moved right up to the date of the collection I acquired (2012-04-23). As updates are done, I’ll make new items. (I realize this means lots of redundancy in the image collections, but space is not a problem at the Archive, and it’s easier to just have multiple items and move people forward over time). It’s all still in rough shape and will be refined in the future.

I don’t wish to pull anyone’s energy or time away from the TOSEC work being done – I just know this project was going to gain attention over here, and I wanted it known I was the person doing this. Now for the why.

Huge organizations, museums and archives and libraries alike, have begun taking an interest in preserving software or aspects of software. In some cases they wish to preserve the items (say, a boxed commercial program) while in others, they find themselves desperately in need of older software (say, a copy of a word processing program or spreadsheet) to allow them to look at acquired old files they’ve been donated. They are often slow, are constantly hindered in their actions because of management or administrative concerns or standards, and are often forced to make less-of-two-evil decisions when it comes to the software being preserved.

TOSEC, meanwhile, has run a decades-plus massive worldwide effort to agnostically save as much of this software as possible. TOSEC has, with no question, blown past any other professional effort in terms of size and breadth of the software they’ve quantified and described. It is a stunning achievement. I have brought professional archivists near to tears showing them the work TOSEC has done.

So I’ve put it on the Archive. I realize there are concerns and debates about this effort, and I understand them. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library with worldwide servers dedicated to bringing humanity’s knowledge to as much of the world as possible. We are known the most for the Wayback machine, but we also have scanned over 2 million books and put most of them online, as well as thousands of movies, hundreds of thousands of music tracks, and an extensive amount of television news programs from around the world. Every 90 seconds, the Archive adds a new book: http://statusboard.archive.org and many, many new files are uploaded every day, of all types.

I respect the TOSEC effort, and hope to mirror as much of it as will shake out over the next couple months and years at the Archive. It’s a bold experiment, to be sure, but I believe very strongly that computer history needs to move forward and software must be treated like the culturally relevant artifact it is.

I’m reachable at jscott@archive.org for comments and questions.

Thanks.

JSMESS is in open beta. Four game consoles and one computer are supported. Many more are coming.

I first postulated this was possible in October of 2011, and I laid out the reasons why this action would lead to a bunch of great side effects and advantages. The MESS emulator, a derivative of the MAME emulation system, had the ability to run or at least engage with running a whole host of computer systems, spanning 40 years of history. The philosophies of MAME, “emulate everything first, do it better and faster later” as well as “declare a system to be a set of discrete emulated chips, then crank on making the chips emulated as well as possible”, have yielded incredible fruit. The MAME and MESS page host lists of what’s been updated with each new version and revision – hundreds of changes every month. If emulation is your bag, or you want to improve our ability as a culture to revisit computers, consoles and arcade games, MAME and MESS continue to be your bag, your best use of your time.

In just four short years, MAME will have had 20 years of intense development on it. And that thing is a brutal, amazing piece of work, nay, of programming art. MESS, the variation for consoles and computers, has had nearly as much effort put into it as well. These are worthwhile endeavors, ported to amazing amounts of platforms. They’re the Emulation Standard.

All that’s going on here is porting MESS so that it runs in a browser via Javascript. The goal is to make it that MESS runs in a browser without a plugin or external program being called. Such a simple idea: Add “Web Browsers” as one of the myriad platforms MESS/MAME runs on. But also so complicated. If you want to hear my video pitch about this as I’ve been describing it to people, here’s one.

A lot of people have spend many hours on this, including Justin de Vesine, Alon Zakai, Andre D, Nintendud, and Justin Kerk. They all deserve accolade for getting us where we are now.

What’s on the roadmap?

• We didn’t just import the ability of MESS to emulate – this port brings in all the many features of MESS that it has developed to work with the items. In some cases, you can hit the TAB key and see all the information and features baked in, but in some cases you can’t, so we’re making sure support for calling these other features will arrive with the first 1.0 issue of JSMESS.
• Specifically, MESS has the ability to call on save states, meaning we can use regular MESS to play or load something, save the state, and it’ll just “work” and be at a specific breakpoint in the computer experience, say having the same Shakespeare sonnet in a multitude of word processors, or being at a high level in a game so you can see a kill screen in action and try to negotiate it even further.
• The keybindings are a mess, and so we’ll want instructions for these different individual emulators to fix that up and maybe set things so that they go to keys that every keyboard has. (For example, the ColecoVision emulator really wants the Number Pad, which not every computer has.)
• Speed, speed, speed. We’ve got some notable slowness for some of the emulations. We have great hope we can fix it, but always like advice towards doing this. The original native MESS compiles all work fine for speed, so it’s a matter of improving the Javascript as well as the Emscripten program for converting items to JS in the first place.

The fun is just beginning! I’m so excited.

But we can’t change everything, although we can certainly mitigate it. To that end, I was touched by a statement made by Edward Tufte at Aaron’s memorial service I attended on Saturday. The quote was this:

“A young man thinks life is a sprint. An older man thinks life is a marathon. And an elderly man realizes it is a relay race.”

As the family gray started hitting me in the mid-30s, I considered color, but for the moment, being gray is a nice advantage – almost never carded anymore unless someone’s being an asshole, and when I say “history” in relation to computers, the teens who see me at hacker cons and tech cons go “well, surely this half-dead bastard knows something”. And some of those young people interact with me, and I am stunned at how much they’re doing, already, and how lucky we are to have them.

In light of recent events, I’ve thought about these people I’ve been unintentionally keeping to myself, just knowing they’re wonderful, and meanwhile you have no idea about them and maybe I’ve not even indicated how wonderful they are to them. So this is a list of people who are not gone, who are rather young, that maybe you should know about and pay attention to, because they have a long way to go and a lot of stuff to do during that time.

• Dan Reetz
• Jordan Bunker
• Kenneth Reitz
• Christine Love
• Schuyler Towne
• Jimmie Rodgers
• Bilal Ghalib
• Ben Winston
• Jeremiah Johnson
• Amber Case
• Alex Laferriere
• Zoe Blade
• David Dolphin

This list is not comprehensive – just a few names off the top of my head. There are many more and I promise to continue to introduce people to them as opportunity presents.

I’d sing praises, but that’s just advertising. Go check them out yourselves.

And as each of you people mentioned find I just called you out – keep doing what you’re doing!

I even had a logo!

Well, let’s quickly discuss what’s happened since the month came to a close.

Most notably, we got a bunch of data on the wiki set up for that month of problem-solving. The site was loaded with all sorts of beginnings, all sorts of well-tended entries, and only a small amount of infighting as to direction. And then we hit the end of the month.

Now, many projects of these sorts peter out and kind of, well, stop. But we’ve had quite the miracle.

Dan Tobias. He took the torch, dude. He (and also HalftheIsland, who has been in there as well) has been editing stuff by the hundreds. And the wiki has gotten better, and better and better.

So Dan has a problem. He’s lonely in there! He needs more help!

This is your time to shine. We have a working Wiki with a clear permanent url:

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org

The File Formats Wiki continues to add material all the time, allows you to add all sorts of information, and brings into focus a whole range of file format enumeration and spotlights. It’s working. People are noticing.

I’ve made it so people can register new accounts instantly. I’ve also made it so that I’m not the only admin/moderator there. It’s time to bring this thing to version 2.0 and beyond.

And benefit from it! The thing is there as reference material. Let’s use it that way.

I look forward to it growing and contining its path. And I want Dan to have a lot more buddies on there doing the goal.

However this works out, my hat is off to you, Dan. You’ve been kicking ass.

Didn’t work out.

The reason was a by-product of me being a remote worker – due to changing funding, archive.org doesn’t currently scan anything for an evening shift, just a day shift, and they’ve never had a weekend shift like I was expecting. And I wanted a weekend evening shift!

So I withdrew, and waited, and started working on a plan B.

Plan B is now in effect.

That’s my friend Chris Orcutt (who has written two excellent noir novels) loading up a rented truck with me, driving to Princeton, NJ, picking up an Internet Archive Scribe Scanner, and hauling it the 100+ miles back to my house.

And then putting it in my house.

So that’s right, my house is about to become an Internet Archive Scanning Center.

Did you think I was messing around? 2013 is about getting it real.

I’m now coordinating with Internet Archive to get my scanning center set up and calibrated. At current expectations (mostly due to my doing significant travel in February), I expect this center to begin scanning in March 2013.

I am Internet Archive Poughkeepsie. Pleased to meet you.

Initially, I am learning to use the system, and will begin scanning some simple obscure book-format documents that have never seen the light of day. I have a gigantic shipping container in my back yard. I have plenty to pick from. I will then begin scanning whenever I have extra time.

Obviously, this will lead to underutilization. So here’s where you come in.

I want volunteers to come in and scan. I would love for them to scan material I have, as well as material they want to scan in that has meaning for them. I want to be able to reach out to a number of computer historical groups but I realize that if it turns out someone has a pile of old cookbooks from the old country, they might be better to scan as well.

I suspect I may have to ask for donations at some point, so we can pay for people staying in hotels or to help fix any parts that break, or so on. We’ll think about that. I don’t really want to do another kickstarter in the forseeable future.

So, you.

Are you interested in coming just outside Poughkeepsie, NY this year for a while, to scan? Are you interested in being involved in this? Can you help me find people? I can’t pay you – I am simply about to set it up that we can scan upwards of 800-1000 pages an hour of documents out there and, as I promised in the beginning of the year, change online computer history forever.

Want in?

Try to imagine a ball of energy, whipping around, looking for somewhere to strike, somewhere to hit, somewhere to find a stopping point or grand finale. Ultimately, just coming to a standstill because there’s just no real place to end up – a miserable standstill.

That’s me.

Us high-profile techie types are very good at jibber-jabber; fantastically good at it – that’s why you might hear of us in the first place. We’re good at bloviating paragraph after paragraph of warm syrupy context-aware verbiage into your screen to make you feel good an articulate person, out there, says things you like.

It will hopefully not be too much of a shock to you to know that some of your heroes don’t like each other too much. Hate, actually. But all-out fights don’t frequently happen because it rattles the audience a bit too much to see the knives come out not after some terrible adversary, but two people who they thought were compatriots on the same side.

Some of those heroes of yours, who I do not particularly like, have already written long things about Aaron. Most generally accurate from their perspective, a few are gleefully getting in the last word, a few are just demonstrating the aforementioned jibber-jabber proficiency.

So, if you didn’t know who Aaron Swartz was, I guarantee you could get a very large amount of information about him online. He did a lot of stuff. He did it very, very young and he died when he was 26, which is a good number to keep in the back of your head when you read how much he did. I don’t have the strength or energy to type “Aaron Swartz” into a search engine for you. If you don’t know him, go look at it.

We met because when I was Mr. Wikipedia Critic, Aaron did a simple programming process to evaluate the accuracy of a claim by Jimbo “Gasbag” Wales. Showing up a pompous doof with actual numbers and pushing those out got my attention, and Aaron and I connected; this was an asshole I could get behind. By this time, of course, he was an old hand at these sorts of things and I was on my own trajectory. But we got along. I followed his tricks and journeys whenever they got in my headlights, which was infrequently, due to my mostly making documentaries. I had no idea he was just 20.

When the indictment silliness came down, I got in on trying to be a voice of “pshaw” with him, providing what amount of support and perspective I could. Unfortunately, I missed his writings about being depressed or I’d have gotten right in there.

I lost a month at 21. Something hit me during my senior year in college. I literally did not leave my apartment for a month; I just lay there, occasionally used a BBS or two, mostly slept. I didn’t know why and when I returned to my classes I’d actually forgotten where half of them were held. Some of the teachers let me by, thankfully, but others held firm and I ended up taking a course in that summer to finally graduate. I can’t for the life of me tell you why that happened. But it did.

I had a half-hearted suicide attempt at 24. Quarter-hearted, really. It was just something to do when I was feeling particularly unhappy about where my life was. Obviously it didn’t take and I’m still around, fuckers. (For the curious, method: exposure to cold).

So I’d probably have tuned my message a bit more. His Skype name turned green a bunch of times and I said hello and told him I’d bake a cake for him with a file in it. I’ve had a couple young friends go to jail for a while due to computer stuff – it was rough but they’re back, maybe less likely to visit The Pirate Bay these days.

But my message for him was one of love and support, to ride it out, to know the wheels of the courts grind slow and fine and THAT’s how you get sad. I said these exact words to him and I know it because I still have our skype chats. Here’s the last of them.

[9/13/2012 11:54:04 AM] Aaron Swartz: HAPPY BIRTHDAY and many more YOU LOOK GOOD IN A WHITE SUIT and have developed an interesting alternative to the period
[9/13/2012 11:56:45 AM] Jason Scott: And you’re not in download jail yet! And that’s a big deal to me and one of the real presents.
[9/13/2012 11:58:15 AM] Jason Scott: So hugs to you
[9/13/2012 11:59:38 AM] Aaron Swartz: thanks. here’s hoping that’s true next year too
[9/13/2012 12:00:59 PM] Jason Scott: the court system is a screeching wheel grinding so slow and miserable that you don’t notice how the high pitch was there for a year when it stops where it does
[9/13/2012 12:02:09 PM] Jason Scott: I’ve been watching. And if you do get a jumpsuit in min sec I’ll drive out and visit often
[9/13/2012 12:02:49 PM] Jason Scott: You’re never alone!
[9/13/2012 12:12:51 PM] Aaron Swartz: Thanks, man. Much love.
[9/18/2012 1:34:04 PM] Jason Scott: Thick and thin, thick and thin. Let me know if I’m needed.
[10/23/2012 1:47:39 PM] Jason Scott: <3
[1/12/2013 9:47:24 AM] Jason Scott: Why?

My sadness at 21 and 24 is compounded when I have the rest of my life so far to look at – I joined Psygnosis, a dream come true, at 25. I started textfiles.com at 28. BBS Documentary filmed from 30-35. GET LAMP from 36-40. Wikipedia asshole critic at 32. Archive Team at 39. All these things I’d have missed.

So right now, I’m mostly sad – sad that Aaron played such a beautiful melody for the first third of his life, and won’t provide the harmonies for the rest.

But I’ll say one thing:

Yes, as mentioned, a lot of people now talking about Aaron are people I don’t like. But Aaron, you see…. Aaron treated us like a RAID setup – he saw past all our flaws and inconsistencies and brought out the best of what we were offering. For me, he pinged me about my warrior spirit and ways to make a difference and what was going wrong out there. For others, he found other qualities to pull from. We all had issues, but he just worked on things to make things better.

So while I have no idea, short of a to-be-discovered directive from him, of what he really might have wanted from me from this point on, I know what it’s going to be.

To persist. And to fight. And to remember.

It was also the first Games on Film festival, where a film I made (GET LAMP), a film I edited (Going Cardboard), and a pile of other movies and documentaries were shown. I’ll talk about them in a moment.

When I wasn’t up in the room with the festival, I was spending time down in the Arcade, which was a beautiful room filled with over a hundred arcade machines. I took some footage for background footage for the Arcade documentary, using the really nice camera setup the kickstarter paid for. Here’s some screengrabs from that footage:

It’s a nice feeling when you’re no longer spending time being concerned about this flaw or that error, and just enjoying the way the footage came out. Most of this was filmed in the early morning hours, when things get loud and spectacularly crazy. A truly productive filming run.

No dates on when the Arcade Documentary will go from in-production to editing, but thanks to this great festival, I can tell you about a few documentaries worth checking out now or in the near future.

First, I saw an in-progress rough cut of Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time, which focuses on arcade collecting and the motivations and expressions of that. I could tell it was a rough cut just by the amount of additional footage the director had in there that would inevitably cut out – but it was enjoyable footage regardless. Here’s a trailer for the film:

You might wonder what my thoughts would be on seeing a film covering something that one of my own documentaries is filming. To be honest, it was initially mixed, but quickly went to gratefulness as I saw what worked, visually, and ways to cover the subject that the film hadn’t and that I knew I could. I actually came away more energized, to be honest. Jeff Von Ward has put together an ambitious work, which looks to be released this year. Looking forward to the final cut.

Martin Touhey showed some new footage from his in-production documentary Inside the Dragon’s Lair, a meditation and study of the story of the Dragon’s Lair laserdisc videogame. I had a great lunch with him, and bless him, he’s already nailed some fantastic interviews, like Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. I have great faith this one’s going to come out and cover Dragon’s Lair wonderfully. He’s got a kickstarter in his future and plans for a 2014 release.

The most unexpected of these new films (to me) had to be Beyond the Game, which was done by a group calling itself Animatronic Ackbar. There’s a trailer from a year ago out, and I’m sure they’ll have another out soon:

As a dark horse contender for my attention, this film blew me away, because I did not expect anyone to take on the subject matter this film does – nothing less than the entirety of the effect of gaming culture in every walk of young life. We see chiptune artists, 8-bit art shows, game competitions, cosplay, arcades, consoles, artwork, historical and celebrity figures who game… even circuitbending. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot more. This thing was truly epic. I look forward to it, later this year.

Three of the other films, I’d seen before, but it was a pleasure to check them out.

One was Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, a brilliantly-edited film about the game of Tetris (primarily for Nintendo, but with other platforms making appearances) and the people who have mastered them, all around the framework of the first world Tetris competition in many years. This film is a clockwork-snappy, top-notch sports film, making the audience smarter and super-aware of the effort going on in this game. It’s a miracle of inclusion and explanation, wrapped in a jaw-dropping story of a life defined and then broken away from the game of Tetris. I can’t recommend it enough.

Another was a showing of Indie Game the Movie, and I’ve said enough to you how much I love that goddamned thing. If you want to hear me love the filmmakers on stage for an hour, just go over here. Anyway, I saw it again. It’s just as good.

Finally, I saw the very-newly released Mojang: The Story of Minecraft. This is an expertly-filmed work about the runaway success of Minecraft and the effect it has on its designer and the company he builds to support it. I almost feel bad sounding so bland, but it’s just good. It’s solid. I have never played Minecraft, and I found their explanation and the collecting of the story of this magical game expertly put together for me to realize how much of a success this has been, and who Notch as a person is, as he confronts the kind of windfall and celebrity that few of us will ever have to know. I feel like they don’t even need my seal of approval – the movie is out there and it’s a hit.

A weekend of documentaries, a pile of films inspiring to my documentary craft, and a room downstairs with dozens of videogames? And I’m not dead?

I’ll take it.

Thanks, MAGfest, and thanks to Chad Williams for curating Games on Film. Loved it.

It’s a simple one, too: “By the end of 2013, change online computer history forever.” I’ve been working at the Internet Archive for nearly two years now, every day better than the last, with memories and happiness among the finest I’ve known. Now it’s time to secure the rigging and sail into the sunrise.

To that end, I am concocting several grandiose projects intended to bring the maximum amount of computer historical data into the best possible and most accessible ways that I can, and ensure they’re at arm’s reach for research, knowledge and reference. Everyone has various subjects and specialties they particularly enjoy – this one is mine.

So let’s begin.

I am shoving over 25,000 manuals, reference sheets, catalogs, code listings and books into the Internet Archive from the directories of the Bitsavers Collection. As we speak, I’m past 2,000 of them, and hundreds are coming in every few hours.

Bitsavers is a brilliant scanning project that has been a dark horse wonder on the internet for years now. It’s the hard work of multiple good people including Al Kossow, who is the curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. With millions of pages scanned from intimidating numbers of sources, Bitsavers is a vital resource, well maintained, and extensively mirrored.

It was only a matter of time, then, that scripts I’d written could be used to ingest all of Bitsavers into a collection at the Internet Archive. It’s only a few dozen gigabytes, right?

ingestor, the script I wrote that does it, will eventually be one of a number of public tools I’ll provide to help people bring bulk-upload projects up to speed. A number of Archive Team members already use these tools. They’re fast, the error checking is a-ok, and once you have a bunch of a certain type of file, you just sit back and watch the Magnificent Contraption (my name for the Internet Archive’s processing infrastructure) in awe.

The Internet Archive is, at its heart, a reading machine – a place where the data can be experienced (audio, video and books) by downloading or streaming all sorts of media. Bitsavers has, to its credit, heavily prioritized acquiring scans and data over presenting it all in a cute little package. Combining these two forces results in an unstoppable library.

Here’s some documents to check out, to see what I’m talking about:

• The original project scope papers by Jef Raskin for the Macintosh computer (1980)
• How Write Protect Tabs worked in 1958. (Disabling writers for Drum Memory)
• The Second West Coast Computer Faire Conference Proceedings (1978)
• The 1960 Tektronix Catalog of Oscilloscopes and other Electronics
• Working with a Winchester Drive Controller in 1983, from Western Digital
• The VT100 hogs the spotlight, so here’s a VK100 Terminal Manual (1982)
• The manual for the Atari 400/800 Text Editor (1981)
• That awesome party back in 1951 when MIT discussed how Magnetic Drums would work

And, I promise you, there’s a lot more in here.

Is it buried? A little. I’ve got plans on how to fix that as well. But for now, I’ll be shoving these documents in as fast as my scripts can wend them and the Magnificent Contraption can OCR/Convert them.

Again, I had nothing to do with the scanning and arrangements of these wonderful documents. I’m just putting them into another framework, another place. And I hope that the toil and effort taken by the Bitsavers volunteers can get even wider recognition.

Stop in, browse around. You might be surprised what you find.

And things are just getting started.

My intention was to post 30 entries in 30 days on here, but that was entirely too aggressive. Mostly, I like to think, because I believe strongly in posting meaty, informative essays and link collections that will make your life better. The background static of a life eating meals, seeing someone do something transiently stupid, or being caught up on the furor of the hour just isn’t what I’ve ever wanted ASCII to be. So I got about half the month filled the way I like to do things, and time has just run out.

By far, the biggest “thing” I’ve been involved with in the latter half of the year in terms of a specific “project” has been the DEFCON Documentary, an attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the DEFCON hacking convention in Las Vegas. I’ve not written much about that production, since I’ve been in production all this time – but at least I can show you something.

On December 25th, I released the DEFCON Documentary Preview Reel, about 20 minutes of DEFCON Documentary-related footage, of which probably 12-15 minutes will be in the final film. Here it is on vimeo:

The DEFCON Documentary Preview Reel has a minor sound issue at the beginning (first part too low, followed by a blast of music) and that’s fixed in a downloadable version DEFCON will be making available sooner rather than later.

Let’s see how I can do for 2013.

2013 is another deal entirely, and here’s the plan.

It was pretty trivial to take stuff already up, already scanned, already extant, and shove it into the Internet Archive. I’ve done that, to the tune of about 80 or 90 terabytes of data. That was easy.

In 2013, I am aiming to expand out to items that are NOT online, and sitting in my physical world.

To that extent, I’ll be setting up stations for magnetic and optical media ingestion, as well as a book scanning station, and will begin the process of blowing in as much material as possible. My goal is to have a truckload of paper material scanned in, as well as a good few wheelbarrows of CD-ROMs and magnetic media. You’ll get access to it all, I promise.

And then I’ll be donating stuff.

It has been interesting for people to find out I might give stuff away – to them, they have the image of me being the last port of call for all manner of material, which really was never my intention – I just intended to ensure it wouldn’t be destroyed and that it would ultimately find a good home.

They’re rare, but I’ve found some places that are good homes, good PERMANENT, WELL-FUNDED, RESPECTFUL homes that will enable people far beyond me to access them. The shipping container in the back yard is a great place, but not all of it really needs to be there – professional archives are waiting for them and it’ll ensure a person who wants to study them can come to them anytime and begin studying. That’s not the case here and I doubt I’ll be that place anytime in the near or distant future.

Now, be clear – I am not sending anything that isn’t scanned in, transferred, or otherwise available. It doesn’t leave without getting online for you, for me, for permanence. And I have so much stuff that has never seen the light of day.

But the time has come – respect has come to computer history from the 1970s-1990s and I intend to both get it under protection and to bring duplicates online. It’s time.

Let’s run through the allegiances and connections one more time, in case people are seeking some easy excuse not to read this text waterfall. I have met the founders of Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler and Perry Chen, on multiple occasions but mostly in the context of them doing meet and greets and so I’m hardly to be considered a buddy. I’ve been to the Kickstarter offices a couple times, once for a party and twice for an event around a kickstarter campaign that went well. I’ve run three kickstarters – all were successful, which has bought me a lot of attention and occasional “heeeeeellllp” style letters that ask me to sprinkle magic knowledge dust on an attempt to raise crazy bucks. Because of those letters, I’ve been an adviser of some capacity to probably two dozen other campaigns, although in no situation have I taken money or compensation for doing so – I just like talking a lot.

I’m also into computer history, and computer history often ends up morphing into Corporate History, since so much of the computer experience has been forming companies great and small to get these industrial items into as many hands as possible. So the historical arc of Kickstarter interests me as much as the things that come from its campaigns. All of what I’m saying here is the typical pseudo-prescient blather that issues forth from the likes of Dave Winer or Robert Scoble or Doc Searls on one of his wistful days, and should be taken that way.

Onward.

Nothing lasts forever. Everything decays and changes and morphs, and when you take this inevitable situation as something that can be subdued with makeup and surgery, ugliness results. Telling yourself you’re different and maybe even staking your existence on that impossible claim leads to downfall and suicide.

What Kickstarter did was something new with something basic. Through an intense twee design and verbiage that was inclusive and distinct, they re-engineered human kindness and artistic patronage into a combination of a casual game and a “best-of” weblog. Initially they did it with an invite-only party, where only friends of friends made the campaigns, but that understandable trial period has long given way to a cascade of projects, intentions and products that you can browse quickly and cleanly, and receive well-geared come-ons that go to a general audience and not to, say, your kitchen and your brother shaking his fists at the sky about how everyone is going to eat lamb pops in three months and just $50,000 would get him at the top of that heap. For that, they have made something very special, something very well created indeed, and the cargo cult sites have popped up like mushrooms, and Kickstarter has received the ultimate linguistic honors – it is a verb, an adjective, a placeholder noun.

Let us pause, as people so often forget to do, to acknowledge how well that has gone.

Let us consider, in point of fact, how compulsive and alluring the Narrative is now. The Narrative is that if you cogently describe your dream, use the skills of your descriptive writing and your well-honed pitch to fill out some blank forms at Kickstarter, and if the smiling 20-somethings in a building in the NY area hit “Approve”, you could find yourself with the needed funds to make that dream happen.

I remember, like it wasn’t over a decade ago, a documentary I saw that interviewed 4 old men about their history, but one died during the multi-year fundraising campaign, so all we saw was a shot of the other three men holding a photo of their lost comrade. I was angry at the filmmaker for not doing something, anything to get the man’s story down, but I was also ambiently angry at a situation where years had to pass between dream and funding. With things like Kickstarter, that period goes down to weeks.

So let us remember what there was before, and how much good has come out of this company and this dream.

…and now, the darkness to come.

Deep underneath Kickstarter, flowing as surely as blood flows in a heart, is money. Maybe that’s not exactly an obscure or unexpected observation, but life and success sometimes misdirects the forces at work. Kickstarter is Money. Requests for money, offers for money, counting of money, a goal of money with progression towards that money goal in increments of money. It’s right there, everywhere. There’s not a page on there that doesn’t mention cash.

There’s no path where this is going to change, nor is it really sensical to. But making that sort of bargain, to rest a business of loans and contribution in the warm clothes of friendship, art, and hope – it has brought great joy but it can’t last. You will not recognize Kickstarter within two years and you will absolutely not recognize Kickstarter in five, assuming there is a Kickstarter to not recognize.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how much desperation and insidiousness money can bring along, especially “real” money that has now begun to flock and flow into Kickstarter’s campaigns. The first hundred-thousand campaign got attention – the first million-dollar campaign got a champagne celebration that raved on as the second million-dollar campaign hit. Million-dollar payouts are a musk that bring out the worst of human nature, from regions and places of darkness that are not to be trifled with.

Overdramatic? I don’t think so – searching the news archive for phrases like “murdered over” gets you some insight into the human condition over things a lot less compelling than a million dollars.

So with a jar of honey thrown into the Pit of Bears, it’s Kickstarter’s game to lose. The question that remains is what they can do to protect themselves against this rising tide of chicanery and greed. Go too suspicious and paranoid and block out income. Continue at the current rate, and in comes The Full Con.

I am positive, as much as I am willing to be, that someone somewhere has rented an office and begun the careful, involved process of building a backstory and a history for their non-existent endeavor. This endeavor will come at you with the warm, smiling pitch of the talented grifter, with an answer for everything and a dream that’s just this side of crazy and therefore that side of compelling. They’ll have domains, a website, a phone number. They’ll give you a feeling of being at the start of something great. And you are. You most certainly are.

But that one big grift, when it happens, will make news but not be the end of things. It’s the endless smaller grifts and failures that add up – stories where people who are always looking for something to grouse about and will jump on any sorrow conducted through a wire will have 1000 words before the horror of the marks have even begun to sink in.

With each one, comes a clampdown – a decision to get out of risky issues, to get away from things more trouble than they’re worth. Already, there are dozens of seemingly arbitrary rewards now verboten on Kickstarter. Soon there will be dozens more.

I’m not down on Kickstarter – Kickstarter is a wonderful thing and we have many dreams to live with before things are beyond saving. And it won’t be a bustling office in Brooklyn one day and an empty shell the next – it doesn’t go that way with ideas that are truly executed as well as they have. But Autumn is coming. Until the cool winds blow, please enjoy the summer days. They have been wonderful.

Now, who’s for lemonade?

I got into Kickstarter early, way early, when it was friends of friends of friends all getting into the precious hipster sleepover of this new big-text-and-white-space fundraising site. It had the sheen of planning about it, of people sitting up late nights arguing at a big screen with prototype layouts and crazy fonts and wanting it to welcome people into the idea of throwing down to make stuff happen. It was very nice. (And psst, very well funded on the back end. They had room to grow.)

The project ideas were generally kind of benign, little twee plans to put on something that needed a few hundred dollars, or heaven forbid a couple thousand, and if we all threw 15 or 20 bucks at it, there we’d go. It was 2009, a lot of online life was pretty ruined but hacked-in poop in browser rendering engines made it all seem like it was going to get better. And kickstarter seemed, for what it was, another cute little idea with lots of design packed into it and a bright future for doing some silly projects here and there.

I ran a few campaigns over the years. Again, this entry is not about that.

No, it’s about the 71 campaigns I was a backer in. Here’s my profile with the record of that. If you start to study it, some sort of personality profile comes out of it. Let me spoil it for you. Here’s what I like:

• Stuff that is put up by one of my buddies. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

It’s hard to take my judgement seriously about them – they’re my buddies! My buddies can do no wrong, that’s why they’re my buddies. If your buddy needs $20 because they’re going to go down to home depot and build an entirely ill-advised sled that has a couch on it, well heck! Why not! Send me a video of you with a broken neck! I’ll even pay a little extra to have my name stitched into the couch, so the cops know who to call when the find the pile!

Now, I’m lucky – I have some talented buddies. But even if they were doomey doom doomed, I’d still support them.

• Crazy-ass documentaries on crazy-ass subjects. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 etc.

As someone who makes crazy-ass documentaries, I appreciate the investment of time, money, sanity and misery that accompanies making a film about something based in reality and which is fluid and flexible in its concoction and implementation. Oh, man, the years it takes to do a decent one! The endless “almost dones” followed by “aw, shit, our sound mix is ass” or “oh no, we need more footage of the main dude to make it all make sense now that he just quit his job”. It’s a thankless iceberg of sad drudge with a tiny cold point of glory sticking out of the water. You bet I’ll throw $50 their way (or more) and then wait, very very very patiently, for the film to come out a notable number of years later.

• “Everyone else is doing it, how can I not”. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Can’t help it, in this case. I see people piling onto a project, waving money, watching the amount slamming up into insane heights, and I have to throw in a ticket just to be around for the really big show. The show might be an explosion or it might be the final cosmic key that takes us all to a pan-dimensional orgasmic space-time utopia. Don’t care. Just want to be there when it happens.

• Oh, what the hell! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I didn’t know I even WANTED this stuff until 30 seconds before I clicked the Back This Project button. I looked at it, went “huh”, and slapped the big green love letter and became a backer. I didn’t need the stuff, I didn’t necessarily want this so badly I couldn’t imagine life without it, but damn… while they’re handing this out, sign me up for one.

Now, what’s the one thing all of these have in common? All of them?

My fucking ATTITUDE.

Every time I clicked that button, I knew what I was doing – I was saying “yeah, toss me in for it”. You see, I’ve been alive for a while. I know that I get into the car with my buddy to help him buy a TV, we might not come home with a TV and in fact we might not get back until tomorrow. (But what a story!) I know that if I back a documentary about a guy and his dream of a balloon chair, I might get a supreme oscar winner in the mail down the road, or I might get a bunch of explanations that the guy died and we’re sorry, everyone, and the raw footage is going somewhere.

Every one of these, every one of them, is me putting money into a jar along with a scrawled note saying SEND IT HERE IF YOU FINISH IT, screwing the lid on, and tossing it into the river. I don’t care if it was my best buddy saying he needed to raise $100 for cookies or someone promising a massively multi-million-dollar-funded AAA game that sends strip-o-grams to your door for life. Every single one was a crap shoot. This was a delightful game of roulette with everything on black and just spinning the wheel.

That’s how I went in.

What have I gotten from it? A lot of amazing.

In my high school, I was in a band, and at one point we had a guest player on a song, a bassist who could not be beat and who kicked ass. His name was Ted Kamp, and 20 years later he did a kickstarter to finish his album. He finished it. I got what I was told he was going to do, some fantastic music, and a personalized autograph saying things had come a long way from the high school days. And they had! Within a month after that, he was playing with a band on the Tonight Show. He’s toured. Fuck yeah!

One of the most fascinating stories to me in animation is the weird history of the Thief and the Cobbler, Richard Williams’ masterpiece that he spent over 20 years on and which collapsed and was shoved out the door heavily butchered. I thought I knew the story, but I wasn’t sure. And so a documentary came up for funding about it, and I dropped money in. I later heard there was a sneak screening at the director’s college, and the college happened to be 10 miles from my house. I shot down there, got right in the middle of the front row, and I got the whole story, director’s long cut version, of the history of this film. Amazing. AMAZING. Now it’s playing film festivals.

My name is on a plaque on the side of a typecasting machine in Portland. It’s in the instruction manual for an Atari 2600 port of Star Castle. It’s in the credits of a nice handful of amazing, released films.

And in my house are DVDs, albums, posters, and bric-a-brac from all sorts of dreams coming true.

Kickstarter has been very, very good for me.

Have some of these trees not borne fruit? Oh, sure! My favorite was one documentary where the editor and director left the project and wrote to tell us this, oh, six months later. (On the other hand, production seems to be going on.) In the 71 backed projects are a handful of ones that are little tombstones marking projects in dormancy or maybe just deep slumber. Some of them, I paid for it to go a certain way, and it has, but there weren’t any rewards, so I just paid and that was kind of where the work ended. (I’m fine with this.)

But you know, it comes back to that attitude.

Somewhere between 2009 and 2012, Kickstarter went from being a site to being a fucking VERB. People who I wouldn’t imagine do much browsing at all talk about kickstarting something near me, or running a kickstarter. I’ve seen it be lauded, analyzed, held up, knocked down. It’s just THERE now. It’s gone huge, as huge as it could possibly go for the moment, but they’re definitely keeping an eye on things.

I’ve spent time with founder Perry Chen, with founder Yancey Strickler, with other employees and planners of Kickstarter. These are bright, energetic people making magic happen. Magic has happened. I have been in dark rooms watching movies on subjects I could never have dreamed would get such coverage, I’ve been at events and listened to music and worn the watch and put on the t-shirt.

Am I a fan? Ya fuckin’ THINK?

But here’s the thing.

At the end of the day, Kickstarter is about money. Oh, sure, it’s about community and support and hugs and unicorn snuggles, but it’s about money. Money to projects that need it. Money invested in these projects. Money spent, money tracked, money returning results. And so it will always be. The next entry on Kickstarter will cover that.

But of all the weird unexpected results to come from the Kickstarter miracle, I’ve been rather surprised how much a secondary equation has entered the mix – one I could never have planned for.

People. People are dicks.

I mean, make no mistake, I knew people were dicks. Along my many travels, I’ve seen lots of dicky people being dicks. I’d be in the middle of some awesome post on a vintage computing forum or in the comments after a news story of meaning and import to me, and there come the dicks. Woo hoo! A bushel of dicks just being POURED on the situation, right where they’re never wanted to needed. But that was more about going “well, lie down with dicks, wake up sticky”.

No, what’s amazing is Kickstarter is to dicks what bright bug zappers are to moths.

I have a confession. Some of my kickstarters? I invested in them, just a bit, to keep up on the assholes.

You see, if you support a kickstarter campaign, when they post an update, you’ll be notified. The e-mail’s even clickable. And so I have a handful of these campaigns where the only reason I am backing them is so I can be notified to run on down to see what these assholes said TODAY.

Because I knew, no matter what the person posted, no matter how positive and forward looking and on-track and amazing, you’d get a nice big ol’ dick sandwich in the comments. Without fail! And if you want to keep on the cutting edge of assholes, it helps to spend time near an asshole attractor.

Kickstarter’s design, purpose, and dream all attract assholes. It’s in the DNA. They will never be rid of them. It can’t be undone, just like no matter what restaurant you run, how clean, how special, someone is still going to just boot puke buckets in the bathroom. You can mitigate it, you can try to keep on top of it, but the fact is, it’s dicks all the way down.

Some of my favorite dickstarters:

• Cigar-chomping, Uncle (or Aunt) Moneybags demanding answers, goddamnit it, answers who “invest” $20 into something and then act like they just backed up a dumpster of cash into someone’s basement. Feature demands, time demands, back-of-the-envelope calculations that they preach and bray about like they’re hard-won economic forecasts. Threats of withdrawing their Andrew Jackson if they don’t get a rundown right now, because they shouldn’t endure this economic hardship without a proper prospectus for this cupcake-baking machine someone is making. What kills me is that this manner of asshole is a given in the film and game industries, but those people are providing tens or hundreds of millions and so the ‘creative’ has to sit there in the chair and quietly take this strap-on because it will lead to the good of the project and the lives of the crew and potential riches and awards down the line. It’s a terrible position to be in, but it’s the reality when so much is on the line. Not so much if you’re waving a $50 like it’s made of hand-spun gold, dick. Throw the cash down and shut up.
• The Technicals. Oh, man, the back-seat engineers and wizards of scientific majesty who get an update or a clarification and start their responses with “Disappointed that….”, followed by the sound of a penguin farting. You didn’t use linux! What about doubling the RAM! How can I be expected to expand this board when you have this style of port! What contingencies have you made for the Chinese manufacturing holiday! This isn’t the shade of red I ordered! (That one actually happened – someone hit the roof because they believed the shade of red had “shifted” from the original mockups and OH MAN it was like someone had shredded their newborn.) The technicals are great because they can endlessly complain without that whole scary “running the project” aspect.
• The Recent Graduates from the Hari Seldon School for Knowing What’s Happening Next. Don’t worry, kickstart organizer – if you delay for any period of time, or provide any number of details, just lean back and let this class of person step right in and predict the whole thing for you. They’ll explain how long you’ll take, why you’re doing it wrong and what would make it work better, and best of all, fill all the details in comments for all the other backers, because someone appointed you the Grand Vizer of the project and you’re the one standing at the balcony letting  the crowd know what the real story is, like some errant scandal sheet column.
• The fallen angels who have have the veil ripped from their eyes. Oh, my most special favorite; the people who write things like “After funding this kickstarter and finding (delay/changes/cancellation/rebooting), I am seriously disappointed and this really costs my faith in kickstarter.” Oh, the pain, the misery, your investment you made freely may not have worked out. Meanwhile you paid $10 for a shitty popcorn 4 times this year and not once did you prostrate at the ticket taker about your shattered love of cinema.” Poetry is the watchword: one person I encountered wrote “this really killed my kickstarter fire.” WHAT EXACTLY IS THE FUEL FOR A KICKSTARTER FIRE

Dicks all the way down! And like I said, there’s some projects I join just to watch them in action. They remind me how much I hate people, but something positive too.

It reminds me that when things go right, when people are not boneheads, when your supporters and fans and friends and family treat you with respect and dignity, it’s not a given, it’s not even the odds-on favorite. It’s a precious show that you, the person getting such support and respect, should recognize and appreciate. I have been so goddamned lucky with my campaigns – so much support, so much assistance, so much eternal love coming from so many quarters and distances. It’s been a joy and it will continue to be a joy. Thanks to every, absolutely every single one of you.

And that’s Kickstarter, in the summer of its life.

I’ll discuss the autumn another time.

But every once in a while, something really stupid happens on Wikipedia, and by once in a while I mean every single goddamned day, and occasionally it’s so “really stupid” someone thinks they have to summon me like I’m Odin and Ragnarök just popped out of the Advent calendar. “Do something”, they say, or maybe something more along the lines of “You should see this”, because if you’re Ralph Nader what you really want to do is witness car crashes.

There’s the internal politicking stupid, which is boring these days, and there’s the “inaccurate howler lives on for months” stupid, which is fleetingly entertainment. Luckily nobody thinks to drag me to those tailgate parties.

No, the big one is “some numbnut gang has decided Wikipedia doesn’t need entries on this this week.”

Now, call me an old-fashioned kinda archiving guy, but keeping stuff around is, on the whole, a good thing. It’s especially a good thing if what’s being kept around is obviously the hard work of dozens or even hundreds of people contributing time and knowledge to make something better. Hey, put down the pitchforks, Charlie. I’m just saying, here. You come up against something that’s obviously got some weight and effort, your first thought isn’t to toss it into the compactor.

Yet all the time, some people get together and think “this entry… I’ve never heard of it… I just did a cursory search and it’s not [made up criteria]. Into the bonfire with you, obscuro!” and then they do that little kangaroo court thing with the Articles for Deletion.

If you don’t know what the whole Article for Deletion thing on Wikipedia is…. great. I mean, just walk away. You don’t need to know exactly what shoegazer crapsongs the pimply-faced badass down the street listens to when he’s tagging your garage door, either. You will not be a better person for it.

But the upshot is that pretty much anybody can get together with as little as 2 other people and decide, across a seven day period, to delete an article. This happens all the time. It’s despicable.

No, don’t jump on my shit by comparing it to normal pruning of vandalism articles or self-promotional spam. We’re talking articles where they’ve been around for years, and people do an AfD, and kill it, or even worse, nominate it over and over, every few months, until at one point they’ve won. See, that’s the brilliance of it: People who are guardians of an article have to defend it over and over, always doing their best to “win”, while the fucks just have to nominate it over and over and win ONCE, and then the article is blown off the face of the earth.

None of this is new. I’ve talked about this before.

What happens in the realm of “let’s go rattle Jason’s tree about this” is that occasionally some weasel on Wikipedia will decide to go after a thematic purge. They decide to go after, say, everything related to famous trailer parks, or infamous London criminals, or anything where they can go plonk, plonk, plonk, right down the line.

And one of the big punching bags is anything related to BBS history.

See, when you’re a a puffy-fingered bureaucrat tapping away from your incredible younger-than-my-shoes point of view, BBS history just tends to fall under “who GIVES a shit”. You find a lack of citation of it, make some wild-ass judgement about whether it was “relevant”, and even if the information is sourced and valid to a small extent considering the scant available material online, you go ahead and just knock that shit out.

So they do this, and then I end up with friends and fans coming to me to tell me what’s going on.

The most recent casualty is Space Empire Elite, a perfectly fine and relevant BBS Door Game that lived a happy life of a few years ago. Pre-web, really, and not ported to some modern flash or html5 equivalent, so not, you know, hitting Reddit every 12 seconds. So it got the boot.

Benj Edwards did a perfectly fine mention of this and a call to arms. He has all the gory details I can barely bring together the energy to peruse, much less summarize.

Anyway, here’s where I diverge from a lot of people.

Fuck Wikipedia.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck Wikipedia.

See, the problem is that people think of wikipedia as a SOURCE. It’s NOT a source. It’s REALITY SLASH FICTION.

You’ve got people randomly making up what they think is important and then writing whatever, day in and day out, and then being able to mess with everyone ELSE’s idea of what’s important, and then everyone can stomp around everyone else’s sand castle until either a topic is so boring and obscure nobody else wants to touch it, or they lock the thing down and flip out if anyone messes with it, especially if that subject or person is in the news. In some cases, the article is in a state of flux constantly – not one of improvement, just churn – endless rewriting and twiddling that doesn’t really do much except let the next person get in there and pee on the hydrant from a slightly different angle. Everybody is a hero. Everybody is the final Grand Poobah of You Get To Stay, and they can adjust their little antler hat and hit the delete button all day long. Life is cheap in Wikipedia, and ideas even cheaper; effort the cheapest of all.

So fuck ‘em.

For years I’ve taken the following groundbreaking approach with BBS history: Snag as much of it as I can from as many sources as I can. Pull together data and documents that are insights into what happened. Interview people who were there. Transfer video recordings and audio recordings and scan documents and make it all into online actuality. You can debate the notability of Space Potato BBS all day, or you can scan and transfer all the Space Potato BBS material and put it somewhere where we don’t get a straw poll every harvest moon to decide to burn it to the ground.

Oh, the faces of the Wiki-faithful when I’m like this in person (and I am, in fact, like this in person). The concerned and sourpuss face when they mention something about Wikipedia and my response is fundamental distaste. The dropped mouth, the sad eyes – it’s like eating delicious key lime pie to me. Seriously: Have fun all day, folks, but I’m not going to put on the party hat and act like this birthday cake isn’t full of horse poop. Nice decorations, though.

No, the solution is to stop thinking of Wikipedia as the Source, the Big Stage, the Final Arbiter. It will fail at this and it will always fail at this as long as people get to undo the work of many others merely by being a persistent keyboard-pushing douchebag. Even on Reddit, when someone informed or at least long-winded and opinion-filled shows up, they can only downvote them into greyness, not delete them entirely.

No, primary sources. Mark my words. 2013 is the year I am scanning and duping in terabytes, terabytes of BBS and home computer material. Trust me – the world is going to get a lot more of what happened in that period.

Let Wikipedia do an article on THAT, is my advice. We’ll get by until then.

I’m putting this here to get some attention.

There’s a documentary in production, or which was in production, which was a mini series about all things 8-bit consoles and computers. It’s called “8 Bit Generation”. It has trailers up. The trailers are fairly incredible.

These trailers are so nice looking, so well shot, so beautiful and so filled with KILLER interviews, I nearly quit documentary filmmaking when I saw them – someone was doing things a billion times better than I could ever do. I emotionally recovered.

These fellows traveled the world and got all sorts of amazing subjects. Among the ones that blew me away was an actual interview with Jack Tramiel. I’d tried – he’d turned me down. And he’s gone, people. This interview they have is it.

So, in 2011 they put up a trailer, and some of the music they had wasn’t cleared, so they took those down and put up new, cleared trailers. Good enough, although that does mean a lot of articles on them point to the missing Vimeo links. But rest assured, things were looking good. They had a website, you could order stuff, you could see how they were going to have a deluxe version (which I ordered) and a whole bunch of features.

This thing looked AWESOME.

And then, poof.

Here’s the website as it used to look. It’s gone now.

They are missing in action. Totally gone. The domain has a year to expire, but there’s no website for it.

Zoe Blade, who has done a bunch of soundtrack work with me, did the soundtrack work with the documentary as well. She’s gone ahead and put the Soundtrack Album up for sale. Take a listen, it’s fantastic stuff.

Now, I’m a realistic guy. I deal with people working on documentaries for years and there’s ups and downs the whole way. It’s kind of The Deal. One of the facts is everything takes longer than it should – the making, the editing, the packaging, the finishing. It just does.

I keep track of a few dozen projects out there. Some take a long time, some go dormant, some live again. I got it.

But this one… this one was special. Unique interviews with unique people. This was going to be a blockbuster.

Guys? Everything OK? Need help?

UPDATE: Through various channels, I am told that the current situation is one edited episode and some potential financial issues with getting the film done. I continue to offer my support in finishing this film, and wish the producers the best in bringing the project to fruition.

So, the great news: Archive Team has been KICKING ASS. This band of people are pretty much an establishment now, with various sub-groups doing daily, hourly work to rescue at-risk websites, retrieve lost data, change the regard of user-generated content, and even get in the face of people with influence and decision-making and make them change long-held beliefs. We are doing really well.

Among our greatest additions is the Archive Team Warrior, a virtual machine that runs on a bunch of platforms and produces an easy-to-use, fast, and well-coordinated effort to download the entire content of a website. It’s friendly, it’s beautiful, and oh man, does it work.

Seriously – this thing is a monster. It took us 9 months to download all of Geocities, which was roughly one terabyte of data. Now, we can run through with this distributed preservation of service of attack and download many sites within a week or month that dwarf Geocities handily. And it’ll be in REALLY nice shape, REALLY great integrity.

The way this system works, the client machines shove them into a buffer box (or buffer boxes) and then those finalized packs of downloaded website information is stored at the Internet Archive. Here’s the Archive Team Collection at Internet Archive.

We have been rescuing a LOT of data, people. We’re past 320 terabytes.

THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TERABYTES OF HISTORY, OF USERS, OF LIVES.

That’s a big deal. And so big, it got on the Internet Archive’s radar, as in “blip, that’s a lot of data you just uploaded”. And yeah, it is! 320 terabytes is, by any current standard, nothing to sneeze at. By our estimation, it represents over 4 million user accounts spread across dozens of now-defunct services and sites.

And as of this month, they’re showing up in the Wayback machine. The Internet Archive is now putting up the newest load, with over 10 Petabytes of web history and media available which includes 240 billion website snapshots. The vast majority of Archive Team downloads are going to be up on the new Wayback machine, meaning those sites that were referenced by others will return. Fun fact: When Geocities went down, Wikipedia had over 100,000 links to Geocities sites for their citations. Wiped out in a night.

We continue to monitor the world and bring in data by the truckload and the Internet Archive has been kind enough to host that data. Without questioning it. Without complaining.

Now it’s time to pay back.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit (that, I disclose, I work for as a “free-range archivist”) that has, since the mid-90s, provided many petabytes and millions of items for free, to the world, to better the world along the way. Movies, radio, books, TV news, software, you name it… the Internet Archive has it, and continues to make it go for everyone. Every day, every night, with an eye on “forever” as a goal, and not just “until we try to sell you an upgrade” or “until we’re bought by someone else”. It’s a library and an archive and it just kicks ass.

Archive Team alone is costing the Internet Archive tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a cold hard fact – we’re doing the work that companies should be doing themselves, and Internet Archive has taken that brunt. But there’s good news.

First, they take tax-deductible donations. A big win right there.

Next, a partner has come forward to do 3-1 donation matching for December 2012. It’s a holiday hard drive! Every dollar you donate results in $4 for the Internet Archive. I’d been dreaming up campaigns and kickstarters and a whole other range of potential fund-raisers, but the fact is, nothing I can come up with beats a 300% instant return on investment. Nothing.

So please do it. Here’s the breakdown of how Internet Archive spends that money:

Pretty much all this money goes into hard drives, and the hope is to raise enough money for 4 petabytes of disk space, which will wipe out Archive Team’s effect AND budget lots of space for next year.

This will really help us.

If you decide to do it (they take Amazon, Paypal and Bitcoin right from the site, and have a contact address for other methods), please leave a comment under here with your thoughts and support.

Thanks a lot.

The vector monitor on Asteroids.

If you see Asteroids online, the “screen” probably looks like this:

That is, it’s a JPEG or PNG or whatever, with the source likely being an emulator of some sort. So everything is crisp, and rasterized, and generated as if were a screen map, that is, from the assumption that it’s a raster screen. Playing the emulator itself is similar – there it is on your recently-vintaged flatscreen, perfectly sharp, definitely of the modern desktop era.

When you see it in the arcade, an original Asteroids machine screen looks kind of like this:

The vector lines, which are created by aiming a beam DIRECTLY AT YOUR EYES only to be stopped by a coated piece of glass, have a completely different feel. The phosphor glows, the shots look like small stars floating across the glass, and a raster line is not to be seen. It’s an entirely different experience, and the teenagers at MAGfest had never seen it before, and unfortunately, it is well on its way out.

(It would be worth it for myself or someone else to do research into “so what is the deal with CRT and vector monitors these days”. Some other time.)

So there’s several ways to go about this “problem”, assuming you recognize it as a “problem” that various types of monitors are disappearing with great speed, every year. One is to hoard old monitors. This is short-sighted and doomed. Another is to forget those monitors never existed. On the plus side, not much energy is required to do that. But these monitors are worth remembering, and it’s certainly the case that the software was written with these old display devices in mind.

Enter geekery.

Originally, emulators were trying to adapt this old software to be useful or at least pretty to modern systems – so the efforts were around scaling and smoothing. I can’t find the at-arms’-reach citation for when this started, but it’s at least a decade old. You could choose to smooth, upscale and anti-alias the graphics for your now-kickass setup, historically wrecking the item, but making it a lot easier to look at. (If you want an earlier situation that’s the same, there’s the adventure of DOOM and OpenGL.)

But meanwhile, CRTs started falling out of favor in a big way, and slightly rounded glass screens and beige enclosures began falling in front of Plasma and LCD.

Ian Bogost used slave student labor and created a Television Simulator to work out some themes in the excellent Racing the Beam book about the Atari 2600′s programming and context. It really opens your eyes to see the difference between the “original” emulated image and the “CRT simulated” graphics:

Suddenly, it’s pretty clear how the perfection of emulation takes away a lot of the analog fog that made digital compelling in a certain way.

Now, not unexpectedly, people were not happy with this implementation, since it wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t flexible. So work continued.

Some time ago, I was shown this image in relation to efforts with simulating a CRT monitor:

We’re getting into the Twilight Zone of Maybe You Don’t See All This Shit Going On, and that’s entirely fine. For some folks, the binary situation of “I can see it / I can not see it” is quite enough – that things are emulated at all is the end of the story. But still, it is quite amazing to me to see such subtle aspects as the curve of the monitor, the glow of pixels against glass, and the bleeding of voltages and scan lines all being emulated in software (sometimes with graphics hardware doing some of the lifting). In fact, working this hard to make these graphics look slightly ‘bad’ is a ton of work.

There’s a bunch of advancement being done with this outlook, using the MAME and MESS emulators. The direct name for this particular project is HLSLMAME. There’s a thread of discussion here about it. (There’s another thread over here as well.)

The images of the screenshots have a haunting quality to them, old but not old. Perfect but imperfect. I really love looking at them.

For an extra bonus, I was sent a few videos of this software CRT emulation in action.

I’ve uploaded them to the Internet Archive, where you can check them out. While you can play them on the Internet Archive’s player, I would not recommend this – all the subtle changes to the video signal are just not as obvious through the compression. Pull down these tens-of-megabytes files and see the changes in the video look through the settings.

When you look at the example configuration files, you realize how much of a tweaker’s paradise this is:

hlsl_enable 1
hlslini %g
hlsl_prescale_x 4
hlsl_prescale_y 4
hlsl_preset -1
hlsl_write 
hlsl_snap_width 2560
hlsl_snap_height 2048
shadow_mask_alpha 0.00
shadow_mask_texture aperture.png
shadow_mask_x_count 320
shadow_mask_y_count 256
shadow_mask_usize 0.187500
shadow_mask_vsize 0.09375
curvature 0.02
pincushion 0.02
scanline_alpha 0.450000
scanline_size 1.25
scanline_height 0.750000
scanline_bright_scale 1.000000
scanline_bright_offset 0.750000
scanline_jitter 0.25
defocus 1.0,1.0
converge_x 0.0,0.0,0.0

...

….and so on. SO MUCH TWEAKING AND KNOBS. But it’s from this we can get some amazingly refined experiences and ideas.

This HLSLMAME thing is currently Windows only, and it’s a little involved to get running, but the point remains the same: this is valuable work, affecting perceptions of the software after its true mechanical components are gone off the earth.

There’s plenty of other aspects awaiting this effort, too: the sounds, the ambience, the buzzing of speakers and the hum of deflection coils. There’s been attempts to make controllers that act like the originals, and there’s always been some leaning towards getting the speed just exactly right, which is harder than it seems.

In all this, it’s the not wanting to lose something than many don’t even notice is lost that’s the critical move. It’s sometimes a bit too OCD and always a little annoying if it’s not that important to you, but realizing what, exactly, has changed for software makes bringing it back that much more likely. It’s a respect for the past beyond the idea of it. It’s messy and weird and geeky but that’s just the way I like it.

Here’s to terrible monitors!

thanks to DFJustin for his assistance

the lion’s share of programming of HLSLMAME is by Ryan Holtz / MooglyGuy