Let’s remove any tension – it has been a fantastic year, where I have gotten more done in the way of preservation and computer history work than my entire previous 40 years combined. Internet Archive seems to like me, I really like them, and I’m staying.

Here I am with the boss:

Brewster and I are two rather different people, and although the Venn diagram of our interests does not intersect everywhere or even close to it, what we do share in terms of goals and passions is very similar. There’s no hidden agenda with this guy – the headquarters in SF isn’t secretly a meth lab, we’re not actually some lobbying group or anti-whatever think tank trying to destroy or anything. There is only the Mission, the goal to bring as much human knowledge as universally as possible, and to preserve and keep all matter of knowledge as reliably as possible.

Oh, there’s occasional office flare-ups and disagreements and I’m sure some clenched fists and not every day is an endless buffet of awesome, but every single person in this organization understands the Mission and pretty much 100% of the disagreement is how best to achieve that mission with what resources there are (or to gain new resources). That’s rather refreshing from, oh, let’s say, every other goddamn place I’ve worked at, where the goals of some people are “get to retirement age” combined with others who mostly have signed up for “do absolutely nothing until you either get bored and leave or get fired”. That’s not going on here. It was a shocking office culture to run into, everyone just kind of pressing in towards the overarching mission without being waylaid by one group trying to undermine the others for some other bonzo reason unrelated to what the place was going for. Again: People leave, people join this place, but they all understand that dream, that plan, that hope, that dream. Maybe this happens elsewhere, but not in my previous lines of work. So that’s somewhat mind-blowing on a daily basis.

I will feel really stupid if I start listing out names of co-workers and then miss some, so I will tell you that I have someone who is a “handler” for me, and she is far and away one of the best bosses I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a few really, really great bosses in my time. I have people I sit with when I’m in San Francisco who are brilliant, hardworking people (again, all aimed at this goal) who do stunning work. We have communication channels where various groups talk, and it’s like shoving your face into a Brilliance Fountain 24/7. I’m not making this stuff up to butter anyone.

Remember, this isn’t people all sitting around figuring out how to monetize farting or who are blowing up paradigms with slide-scale infradoobles using Ruby on Crack combined with Hibbledoo Middleware. This is a non-profit online library providing petabytes (petabytes!) of data to millions in the most efficient way possible. Speaking of which…

One of the job descriptions/goals for me was “bring in data”.

I just checked the internal tracker to see how I’ve been doing on the upload front. Very well, apparently – I have uploaded 120 terabytes of data. That’s into 82,438 individual items, which could be anything from texts or songs up through to .tar files of web captures. When I started, I said my goal was to upload a terabyte of data a month. As I am apparently doing ten times that amount, I’ll consider that goal met.

I’ve brought in so much “stuff”, in fact, that it would nearly impossible for me to tell you all of it. Let’s throw out some highlights.

I was asked to look into bringing in software. So, I started out with CD-ROM shareware discs, not dissimilar to what I have with cd.textfiles.com. Well, that has been a wild success. I am ready to declare The Internet Archive as the largest collection of shareware on the Internet. Seriously. First, there’s over 1,100 CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs contained in the CD-ROM collection. But oh, it gets better. You see, functionality was added this year to allow you to browse inside the ISO images. Feast your eyes inside this CD-ROM, for example. You just add a slash at the end of the ISO image reference and there you are. But let’s go even further than that: Let’s take a GIF file of Winter from 1991: http://archive.org/download/SoMuchSharewareV1_918/SoMuchSharewareV1_1991.iso/GIFS/WINTER2H.GIF

You see how you can reference a file inside a CD-ROM image in a permanent URL that can be pulled from anywhere? That’s why, as far as I’m concerned, The Internet Archive now has well over four million shareware programs, artworks and documents online. At least. That’s a game changer. And this year? We’re going to double it.

Computer magazines. Lots and lots and lots of computer magazines. Out of print, fondly remembered and otherwise obscure magazines on a range of technical subjects, currently the province of attics and basements and long-unopened warehouses and a smattering of living spaces – now up and readable.

This collection of computer magazines as well as a smaller spanish-language set constitute  30 years of technical publication, and well over a thousand individual issues, many of those in the hundreds of pages rage, which means there’s a lot of history squished into all this data. I’ve already been informed of university and high school classes out there using these issues to bring up discussions of history or to point out aspects of computer technology that have shifted or changed. Some of the issues have indexes already (the Compute! Magazine collection is a shining example) and I hope more will get them over time. I’ve got lots more issues to add, too.

Manuals! Damn, do I love getting manuals up where people don’t have to search like crazy to find them. It actually saves the environment to some small amount, since people will happily buy older equipment knowing they can get the manual easily and make the use of the item. So manuals are a big deal:

Arcade manuals. DEC manuals. Synthesizer manuals. Commodore manuals. Whenever I track down a cache of these or get sent them, they go up. I want to be able to have someone grab any piece of equipment new or old and understand what exactly everything does on it, and maybe even the why.

Audio! Video! 59,000 open-licensed albums. 2,100 nights of live and club music. Hours of GET LAMP raw interviews. A complete port of 10 years of Jesse Thorn’s The Sound of Young America. Bit by Bit. There are many other such audio and video projects where I use scripts to get them into the archive as collections – part of my work has been writing stuff to inject massive amounts of data into archive.org’s servers to make it that the uploading is the least of the issues. Which brings us to:

FUCK YEAH, ARCHIVE TEAM. I can’t begin to really describe how much data Archive Team has brought in – so many people working together to take snapshots of important things that are being shut down with poor or no notice, as well as proactive “panic downloads” where we recognize things are on the outs and we grab as best a copy as we can.

Like the Internet Archive itself, Archive Team’s collections are not always meant to be short-term beneficial and in fact are pretty clunky – 50gb .tar files and the like. What they are meant to be is raw material for later efforts and rescue of lost data – the panic downloads are basically someone stepping in at the present time and running the duper just before a whole range of data disappears forever. Some of it will be absorbed into the Wayback machine. Some will be filleted for their GIFs or mp3s or who knows what else. And still others will result in data, meaningful first-generation data about how people used computers or how solutions were found to old problems. Or maybe we’ll just laugh at the hair.

I’d go off more on Archive Team but I’m scheduled for something like a half-dozen speaking engagements around the world this year related to it, so I’ll probably just link to those talks when they come out. Actually, here’s a talk I gave about it a couple months ago, which is hosted at, and took place, at the Internet archive.

As we speak, Archive Team is uploading something like 25 gigabytes an hour into the Internet Archive. Chew on that for a bit. So many good people, so much good work, on both sides of the wire.

This is getting a bit long, and I’ll split more out into entries this year to give context and meaning, but the upshot is that this has been a very successful year, a lot of amazing things are happening and continue to happen, and every single waking moment I spend related to this “job” is what I’ve always wanted to do.

And that’s pretty nice. Thanks for taking the gamble, Brewster!

“I am not going to sell Socks out.  Period.  Drag your “proposal” or ‘touching base” or “big idea” or “possibility” to your trash icon, or I’ll kindly take the time to do it for you.  The store is closed. It was never open.”

I also felt I had to clarify what “selling out” meant, and what I came up with was:

For me, “Selling Out” for something like Socks comes when the cat or myself are doing things we would never do on our own, and people give us money to convince us to do this. Oh, they may couch it as “paying for your time and effort” or “to help with your maintenance costs”, but it’s taking cash to do something otherwise never happening.

So in that spirit and knowing that, I will inform you I was contacted a month or two ago by a company that wanted me to sell Socks out. Do a promoted tweet, as they call it. As usual, I toy with these guys, so I needled them along and asked how much. $5000/tweet, they said.

Hmm.

Sockington (the actual grey cat) is now (we think) about seven. Penny (the actual orange cat) is now easily ten. Penny and Socks have both seen years of very nice health – no major issues, no overnight visits, you name it. They’re kept on a good diet and kept indoors and exercised and they’re in a rather beautiful home outside of Boston, a place of stairs to climb and rooms to run and general Cat Heaven.

But cats don’t live forever and let me tell you, being involved in the whole Sockington Twitter thing has told me an awful lot about how quickly things go with them. One day they’re purring in your lap and wondering when the next mealtime is, and the next day they’re very, very sadly meowing and you go to the Vet and the Vet suddenly drops in your lap some sort of terrible decision. And that decision is often one that, bluntly, translates to “For three thousand dollars, your cat will live for at least months and probably years, or we can kill it.”

So, call it the years piling on, but I had this rough idea in my head that it might be kind of sweet of Socks and Penny (and Tweetie, the third cat, who needed actual $1500 surgery a year or two ago) to have a couple tweets that ensured that the only decision in a future medical malady was how fast they could get back on their feet. Call it a wavering, a moment of weakness, maybe for some of you a “cold dose of reality”. But what the heck, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to these people.

It took a while, weeks really, but they eventually came back with actual things to sign. And, of course, because everyone in that sort of business is a bait-and-switch scumbag, it suddenly went from “$5000/tweet” to “$2500/two tweets”. And if that sounds awesome, it would be scripted by someone else, specifically to sell a product, a product that had nothing to do with cats.

Subsequently, I could see how this was going to go. With an Non-disclosure agreement attached, and more requirements than I could shake a stick at, it was going to be months of e-mails to get the actual money, money which, again, falls down into the “I sort of have access to that kind of money” level and which, like any such thing done, was a loss of principle and meaning in the name of some hocked-together justification. It’ll heal my cats!!!!!!!!

So while there was this tiny, tiny percentage of me going “hmm”, most of me got sickened by the entire enterprise within a day or two, and as the actual documents piled in, that pretty much settled it. So no, Socks continues to not push house cleaning products on his twitter feed. He continues to be a very strange, very odd little cat.

And as for my little bait-and-switch scumbag marketing guys, who wanted to make a cat tweet about some household product for a few bucks, and were willing to jerk me around for eyeballs? It turns out I don’t do that.

But what I will do is drop all the documents and contracts related to the deal.

So here we go, here’s everything they sent me.

• A W9 (Tax ID Number) request form, which is pretty standard, but still, it’s for a cat tweet.
• A Vendor Diversity form, in case there was a bonus diversity to the Sockington enterprise. like being a historically black college or if Socks lived in a generally downtrodden part of the countryside, just waiting to be lifted out of poverty.
• Finally, here’s what you probably want to actually read: Sponsored Social Media Agreement 04-27-12 - a word-compatible .doc file of the terms of two Sockington tweets to promote the product in question.

Oh, it’s all in there – the kind of stuff you sign your life away with as “talent” in a promotion, the willingness to get involved in secrecy, in acting like oh, one day Socks decided to start tweeting about some sort of product, in a way unlike himself, and right off to those delicious million eyeballs.

Somewhere down there is this line:

Talent agrees that if Talent commits a material breach of any provision of this Agreement or at any time fails or refuses to fulfill Talent’s obligations hereunder, then Marketer or Agency may terminate this Agreement and Talent will not be entitled to any compensation. Talent further agrees that if Talent should die, or fail to fulfill Talent’s obligations hereunder due to illness, injury or accident so that, in Marketer’s or Agency’s judgment, Talent’s disability will preclude Talent from rendering the Services described above, then Marketer or Agency may terminate this Agreement and Talent will not be entitled to any compensation.

Since I didn’t sign, and I have told you about it, I guess that constitutes a “material pre-breach”, where I’ve already taken a big ol’ dump on the whole prospect of the cat being turned into a mouthpiece for said products. Oh well. I’ll get over it.

Enjoy the glimpse into how bad it can get.

And I’ll pet Sockington for you.

So, last year I had this dream to help encouraging the porting of MESS (the Multi-Emulator Super System) to Javascript. We used a Colecovision emulator in the system because MESS had a compilation option to do just that system (called mess-tiny) so we could focus on the main problems. We did it, and this past week we had a working Colecovision emulator (currently slow, no sound, but playable in many browsers). That took five months.

Within ONE DAY of getting this all working, the team has gotten the port working for a second platform: The Magnavox Odyssey 2 (1978). I don’t have all the details but we may be capable of making this work for all 326 emulated computer platforms in MESS, now. This is why I wanted this system to go forward – once we worked out bugs, the effort would leapfrog like crazy. (A special shout-out to DF Justin for getting this O2 emulation working so quickly.)

So, now that it can do the Odyssey 2, it was trivial for it to emulate a very famous piece of software: Munchkin/K.C. Munchkin, a program that was pulled off the shelves because of the first “Look and Feel” legal battle in software. Here, then, is an example page of how one might use this program in the future – a page where you read about the Odyssey 2, about K.C. Munchkin, and then you try K.C. Munchkin.

Now, we still have a long way to go on some things – for example, it ALWAYS tries to start the game when you reload, and we still have no sound, and it’s still very slow. But I hope that demonstration page shows what I’ve been shooting for – a world where you read about a piece of software, learn about the context of it, and then take it for a spin, right there, and try some things out. Just like we do with movies, with music, with documents.

That’s pretty amazing.

Let me state the goal again: take the MESS project, which is a massive open-sourced effort to emulate every possible computer system and console that exists, and make it run in a window in a browser. In doing so, allow anyone with a web browser of reasonable power the ability to experience, in great convenience, many of the aspects of any previously made software in human history. This is a very lofty goal.

Some of this has been discussed before, but if this is the first time you’re hearing of it, let me quickly go over it.

• After deciding to go with a Javascript port of MESS, I needed coders comfortable with the idea. I did not need people telling me it was impossible or not to do it. Luckily I got a few key examples of the first group and could ignore the second.
• The plan, hatched with a couple of people, was to use Emscripten to convert MESS source code to something running in Javascript. This would require people competent in Emscripten, Emscripten source code, MESS source code, and Javascript. More pushback, more nay-sayers. But we found them.
• A month or two ago, we got a public-domain colecovision cart to render using this setup. But no keypresses. Now we have keypresses.

The running joke for me was “WHERE ARE MY SMURFS”. The acid test for me, the proof this was possible, was a window running a playable copy of Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle, which was truly a terrible game but one I played over at my friend Paul’s house in 1982. As the team tirelessly ran through the dozens and dozens of tweaks, on the addition of features to Emscripten and the makefile mods to MESS, “WHERE ARE MY SMURFS”.

And now the smurfs have come:

Oh, make no mistake: It’s slow as molasses. (Running at 12% speed on my browser on a pretty high-powered machine) It has no sound (we’re working on it). And the keys can sometimes be grabbed away by other processes and materials. (Key bindings are a bitch, and still being hacked away at.) But it works. Multiple people took me aside to “help” me by explaining how it was entirely impossible this could ever happen. But it happened. It works.

It even lets you use the internal menu of the MESS program: here it is letting you know about the CPU and the video output:

We did some tests with multiple Colecovision cartridges – it plays most. (Not all, of course, depending on how well MESS emulates anything and a bunch of other factors.) So right now it can do about 100 cartridges. It’s proof of concept.

But now we’re expanding out.

Next we’re going after the Magnavox Odyssey², specifically to be able to run K.C. Munchkin, a historically important console game pulled in the early salvos of the “look and feel” wars started by Atari. We’re also trying for the Apple II.

This is where the payoff comes, you see – the MESS emulator can emulate 632 unique systems with 1,668 total system variations. 632! As we build frameworks for compilation, we’ll have javascript emulators for all of these, all able to follow the MESS development cycle, which is enormously aggressive.

So how can you help?

• We need testers. I didn’t want to drag people in until we started having something for them to see – and now we do. We need people to run through items as we add them, to find weirdness and missing items and the rest.
• We need Javascript coders. Emscripten produces, not surprisingly, some pretty tangled code in compilation. Someone might find ways to make individual compilations faster, speeding up these items that much more. Maybe we’re missing some settings that will make the output work better on more platforms.
• We need you to improve MESS. My dream is that this project will ensure, once and for all, that any work you throw into the MESS emulator will have instant, worldwide effect, as improvements on emulation will show up in browser windows everywhere. It’s not some obscure thing – I want these to end up being general purpose computer utilities that people use to portray older computers in windows, and your work will be very prominent. Read up on them and join them.

Please come to #jsmess on EFnet or e-mail me. Get involved. If you were on the wall wondering if the thing could ever even work, it does. It works. Now help us make it work well.

I don’t discuss my own family history before my being born all that often – mostly out of privacy, partially out of not having been there, and maybe a dash of “too busy on other subjects”, but I wanted to mention how I changed my mind on something, and maybe others will change their mind too.

I had kind of a thing going, an intention to not really set foot in Germany. It’s actually hard to avoid an entire country, especially once you start travelling nearby, and while I did end up taking a train through Germany, and at one point I had to transfer planes at an airport in Germany as well, I was kind of avoiding the place.

You see, World War II wasn’t all that great to some lines of my family. We lost enough family members through direct, specific murder that in a few cases we don’t even know what their names were. At this point, pretty much all relatives same-generation connected to them are gone, so I’ll mention it, but let’s just set that down here. Really bad situation. entire branches of family hauled off and killed. Sorry, can’t sugar-coat that.

So somewhere along that line, I had come up with some rough decision that that was it for my visiting Germany, Germany had killed quite enough of the family, thanks, and I wasn’t going to go there. Obviously I ended up taking a train through the country on the way to another one and the I transferred a plane at one point. But somehow, going directly there seemed wrong, somehow.

Here it is, 2012, and I accepted an invitation to come speak about Geocities in Germany later this year. Let me mention why.

On my way down to MAGfest in Maryland to do some documentary screening and filming, I found myself at 9am looking for something to eat. So I pulled off Interstate 95, in Aberdeen, Maryland, and looked for a breakfast. As I was driving down this exit road, I spied a barbershop. Well, heck, I could use a haircut, I thought – I was definitely looking scruffy and a small trim would go well with my outfit and efforts to film people at MAGfest.

So that was how I found myself at the All-American Barber Shop. It was a tiny affair, set into a strip mall as it was, and was itself a little run-down, but I’ve had plenty of haircuts, and you can’t judge what you’re going to get just because the old guy with the scissors has a few scant tools at his disposal, versus some chrome-and-rainbows megacut place in the middle of a city. So I caught them as they were opening, and I got to be haircut #1.

It was the barber and his, well, I assume buddy – he might have been another haircut guy who was off-duty or just a bullshittin’ friend who showed up for the opening shift when nobody, at 9am on a thursday, is thinking “man, I could use a haircut toot sweet before heading in late to work”. I can’t tell you much about them except they were full-gray old, and the barber, my barber, was in a suit and the other person was in a tracksuit.

So, the hair’s getting cut and these two guys are chatting, and of course they’re going all over the map based on what the news on the radio is blasting. Some discussion of war hit the radio, and they were talking about this or that, and they mentioned the relatively low casualties of the recent wars. Being a historian, I casually referenced the Battle of Verdun, which, look it up, is pretty astounding – hundreds of thousands of deaths over a small territory in the course of ten months. Oh, you know me – always throwing in where I shouldn’t.

So then, with my hair getting cut in my little plastic sheet that I’m wearing, I hear the tracksuited man reference how there were lots of terrible deaths, except of course that whole “millions of jews in world war II thing”.

Uh oh, I thought, did he just…

So for the next 10 minutes or so, I get to hear these two guys discussing how overblown that killed-jews number is, how most of them just left, that it wasn’t that many people anyway. They went on for quite a while, touching on a pretty wide range of related topics, referencing learned items from some “pamphlets” one of them had – “they tell you stuff you would not believe!” stuck out as a phrase in there. Yes, I am sure I would not believe most of what you apparently read in your literature.

So, I have this very old pair of scissors. I mean, really old. Somewhat rusty, although sharp enough that it has function. They come from my great-uncle Sam, who, I can assure you, had a number tattooed on his arm, who had watched his infant son killed in front of him, who had nearly all his immediate family forcibly hauled off and never seen again, and who, after being processed inside an actual, real concentration camp, scaled the fence and refugee’d himself into the US. I promise you, this really happened. And when he got here, the job he ended up having for many, many years, until he died like someone should die if there’s justice, of a heart attack while shoveling the snow out of his suburban driveway, was that of a barber.

So I keep those scissors, you see, because they went through a lot and yet they still work, and I like to keep him fresh in my mind.

So these two gentlemen, happily denying that anything like that happened, who were tossing off “facts” and “figures” like it was all some sort of distant hoax put on as a prank by some 1940s yids, well, they helped me realize something.

My family wasn’t murdered by Germans. They were murdered by a mindset.

A mindset that really doesn’t know a border, one that doesn’t really tolerate getting out of line, and which, once you dehumanize or destroy something a ways away, be it miles or thousands of miles away, can infest and infect for decades, reducing something very real into the realm of chuckling derision by two idiots in a crappy barber shop called the “All American Barber”.

So I’m going to Germany. I’ll be speaking about Geocities.

You can’t bring scissors on a plane. That’s the only reason I won’t be bringing them.

Sears, that venerable chain of mail catalogs-turned-stores-turned-K-Mart-Meal, has a Parts Direct website where, in theory, you can buy anything they ever sold. Naturally, some parts become discontinued, as old parts often do. You wouldn’t be surprised to hear a warehouse dumped old items, especially old technology/computer parts, long ago. What you would be surprised about is if they still offered replacement parts for computers that have not been for sale for 25 years.

Enter the Atari 400.

Man, I get so happy looking at this thing, because it brings me way the hell back to when it first came out – I was about 11 when I would see it at the mall, and that price tag, about $500, seemed almost attainable, almost within reach. (It wasn’t; I was dirt poor at the time.) Ironically, that keyboard, that flat touch-panel keyboard, made it irresistible to me, even though older-me knows, looking at it, what an utter pain in the ass it would be to use it for any amount of time. The colors were so rich, the font so distinct, I just fell in love with it.

(As it turns out, I ended up getting the Atari 800, a more expensive model in the same family that had all the things that the 400 lacked, and I was a much happier person, if a few years past the drooling child who wanted that computer so badly.)

Here’s what the Sears catalog page for the Atari 400 looked like:

I am much older since then – in fact, it’s been 30 years since my endless staring at the Atari 400 at Service Merchandise. So imagine my surprise when I found out that the parts for Atari 400s were still available at the Sears Parts website. Along with, I might add, diagrams to help you understand the parts:

Remember, there’s a big market for used computer parts. Big, big, big. Vintage computer groups get together and trade items. People trade software, t-shirts, stickers, hardware, you name it. The better in shape, the more valuable. In nearly every trade of older hardware, be it computers or car parts or scientific equipment or tools, there’s the concept of NEW OLD STOCK, which is where something was made, at the factory, sealed up, and then never touched again. You pull it out of the bag (assuming the cultural aspects of your group allow it), and it is new, like you just stepped back in time. It is the year it came out, and you’ve stopped down to get your new toy. It’s right here. That experience can almost be priceless, although be rest assured that there is almost always an actual price. A high one, in fact.

But on this page, for a moment, it appeared that you could, against all odds and reason, order Atari 400 replacement parts as if they’d never gone out of style, never dropped out in favor of the later models and the march of progress. A lot of people might say “well, it would never actually happen” and not waste the time to go through the pain of ordering,  putting money on the line, and then waiting however long to see if New Old Stock Atari parts arrived in the mail like it was no big thing.

I am not a lot of people.

I ordered 46-33811-3 (SPEAKER ASSE), 46-353101-3 (PCB MOTHER), 46-691496-3 (TV SW BOX), and 46-353099-3 (PCB RAM BD). If you’re looking at the diagram above, that’s numbers 5 and 9 and two other parts not shown. I chose the ones that were hardest to replace with newer versions; power supplies, for example, could be reborn a thousand new ways (and have been). One exception: The TV SW BOX, i.e. RF Modulator, which could easily be replaced but was $12, so I could see how well the system worked, assuming they had actually gone through the trouble of finding a new RF modulator replacement.

Let’s not waste your time with suspense. The experiment’s result is Sears Doesn’t Have Shit.

On one hand, hooray, that’s $250 I get back. On the other hand, it means an end to my dream of having a box arrive on my front porch, with a Sears mark, and opening it to find a perfect Atari 400 part packaged like “Pac-Man Fever” is blasting on the radio behind me and I have not yet kissed anyone.

So, a small tangent to this.

Sears in the 1970s was at the end of when department stores, in general, actually gave a damn about their products, about the customers, and about doing things right. There were problems, to be sure, but some things were very, very sacred. And with a history spanning either 80 or 100 years depending on how you looked at it, Sears, Roebuck and Co. treated the maintenance of the products they sold as inherently sacred. To that extent, in the 1970s, Atari had to provide Sears with ways to repair, maintain, and inspect the Atari 400. This resulted in a repairman’s manual for same. (Thanks to Charliecron for this image);

Can you imagine many contemporary companies having this situation for, say, a hard drive or a flat-screen TV? A custom, in-house manual for their repair department to be able to take the item in and fix it back into working order? Those times are, on the whole, pretty much gone.

And they have to be – margins are smaller than ever, integration is still vertical but not in the name of making things better, and who cares, we’re going to throw all this crap out in 2 years when we add a whooziz to it.

In 2004, Sears was bought out by K-Mart, itself a venerable company but one much less aimed towards the kind of item maintenance and appliance/electronics focus Sears had from its tool catalog days. And I don’t really need to talk about how chain stores’ fortunes have risen and fallen dramatically over the past few decades, other to say that a lot of things were flung away through the fortunes raised and lost.

Apparently some of those things were Atari parts.

CONCLUSION: PARTS UNAVAILABLE – STICK WITH E-BAY.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield. Once we put photos in a scrapbook. Today we put them on Flickr. Once we chronicled our days in a diary. Now we update our Facebook page. Once we kept Super 8 movies of our kids. These days we post videos on YouTube. Once upon a time, we also put things on GeoCities and Friendster and Google Video. But now – they’re long gone.

Well, Jason Scott operates on the premise that every repository of user-generated content online will one day die but that the content we put there is worth saving. He leads an ad hoc group of archivists called the Archive Team, who swoop in to salvage material when a site is closing. Still, he wishes the users would render his service obsolete. And so, he urges everyone who begins to post to prepare for the end.

JASON SCOTT:  Anytime you want to join up with anything, any kind of service that lets you do things for free, the first question is, where is your export function, where can I grab a copy from your site of the material? If they say, we’re working on it, then they’re lying to you. It should be as easy for them to do that as anything else. So if they do have an export function, use it. People put their lives online and then one day wake up and realize it’s not there anymore. They are keeping their memories on spinning magnetic pieces of metal.

BOB GARFIELD:  That somebody else owns.

JASON SCOTT:  Yes.

BOB GARFIELD:  Set the scene for me. You get the notice of some service that is on its way out, what do you do?

JASON SCOTT:  It’s helpful to understand that there’s a whole bunch of services out there, where you might have millions of accounts – things like GeoCities, Friendster, you know, even places like Foursquare and Flickr, where people have been encouraged to, for free, upload things they made or are doing, and then at some point someone moves a check mark from column A to column B, and they decide, eh, after this next financial quarter I think we’ll be taking this down. And the amount of time they give you is – basically random.

I’ve seen everything from six months to 48 hours. And all these people who may not have even thought about this site for – years suddenly are having it taken away. They might not be alive, they may not know how to get to their old account. They may not be checking that email.

And so, what we did was come up with this idea of the Archive Team, a collection of archivists, developers, and we would do our best to take one snapshot of the place, put it into an archive and give people the option of getting some of their data back.

BOB GARFIELD:  Give me some example. What sites have you rushed in to salvage what is stored there?

JASON SCOTT:  There were a couple of sites that did podcasts – Podango, MyPodcast. And what would happen is, is they would literally give you four or five days to get off – thousands of shows, thousands of episodes. So we go in and we’ve pulled down hundreds and hundreds of shows and thousands of episodes.

Poetry.com, that was a company where people were basically making their poems available, and it had about 14 million written poems. And the company basically announced, we’re shutting down, we’re going to give you about a month, hope you enjoyed your time [LAUGHS] with your poetry. So we went in and we started downloading it, and what we discovered, to our great surprise, was they started blocking us from downloading the poetry.

BOB GARFIELD:  What was the relationship between you and the authors at the time? Did they express frustration that they couldn’t get at their stuff?

JASON SCOTT:  One of the things that always breaks our heart is that one of these companies will announce they’re shutting down, and they’ll put it into a blog post – “Goodbye, it’s been great,” and then all the comments will be, “Please help me, how do I save this? I can’t find my husband’s password, he died two years ago.” You know, we get compared to firemen. You’d go in and you try to grab what you can.

So we grabbed the most popular poems, based on their viewer counts, and then we tried to sequentially go through and get as many poems as we could.

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, there’s a little vigilantism you’re describing here. Tell me about the legality?

JASON SCOTT:  Oh man, you know, the thing is we all know that this country is a little psychotic about copyright, right? I mean, just a little bit. We’re not selling what we’re putting here. We’re not putting ads on it and putting it back up again. We’re definitely not giving it to other businesses and selling it to them, you know?

Some of these things have no commercial value whatsoever, some of them might have commercial value, but the fact is, is that we are literally being that guy that hopefully in 20 years, 50 years someone goes, “Oh, thank goodness they were here at that point.”

Sites that block us are extremely rare because we find these companies have actually given up not just watching them but even caring about them.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, much of what anyone posts is trivial, and if it gets lost, who cares. Is most of what you bring back just kind of, I don’t know, junk?

JASON SCOTT:  You know, the example that I give is a Civil War letter to a wife from her husband who was on the front lines. It might be the most trivial thing just saying, hope the cows are okay, hope you’re fine, but there’s so much other information coded in there.

There could be a water mark showing that a company that said it never worked for that side did, in fact, sell paper to that side. It could be a certain kind of ink. It could be that that one front guy became a general, and this is one of the few cases of him signing his own name.

I know it’s a stretch but there are people right now taking some of the things we download and doing cultural analysis: “This is what happens when life went online, this is what happened when people reached a larger audience than their genetic line had ever reached. What did they do, given that power?”

And so, even though we might objectively say this is trivial, I wouldn’t want these read out to me one by one forever, everything historical that we see is because a whole line of people said, “Let’s now throw out that box, let’s not delete that tape, let’s not get rid of those pictures.” And I don’t want to be the guy who decided, okay, this is good, this is bad and then a hundred years later be hated.

BOB GARFIELD:  Jason, thank you very much.

JASON SCOTT:  Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:  Jason Scott leads the Archive Team.

♦

So, we can leave the interview at that, but I won’t. If you want to read on, that’s your choice.

As a semi-professional attention getter, I end up being interviewed a lot, especially when some hot new thing is attached to me. In the current realm, that hot new thing is Archive Team. It’s got what the hungry news producer wants: a humanity-endearing goal (preserve), a bad guy (everyone who is deleting user data for money reasons), and a guy who’s up for being really loud and really intense (me). There’s a lot more to Archive Team than just me, of course, but as it is I am sucked into studios for discussing this whole mess quite frequently.

I was interviewed by the BBC for a show called “Click!“, the results of which are available, to some extent, at this link. To do this, the BBC rented space near where I was in San Francisco that week – they actually used a studio called KQED. Here’s some shots from that:

In this particular case, the engineer was a little off the ball, dragging on with the previous setup so that the rented time that the BBC had was cut by a half-hour. We got on track pretty quickly, and my two hosts were very talented at bringing the whole thing a sort of growly-sexy “now, we’re all having a bit of a fun, but what of the deeper meaning” vibe that I only really see in English programs. I was coy about the names of companies Archive Team was targeting that week, mostly because I didn’t want it to filter into boardrooms and cause a panic mode, but the BBC guys sussed out which companies I was talking about anyway, so kudos for doing a little legwork. As you can see from the photos, you sit at a desk and have a huge microphone, as well as seats for other guests and speakers with everyone looking at you. KQED is a hell of a nice studio, and it was a pleasure to be in there.

Perhaps it’s a little jarring that you don’t see your hosts, and will never see them, but the people involved tend to be professionals and end up making it like the greatest-sounding phone call of your life. It’s a fun gig and I will happily continue to do them.

So contact came in from a producer of the NPR show “On the Media” to discuss Archive Team, and it’s obvious they wanted it because of a relatively recent magazine writeup, as well as wanting it right away. After some back and forth discussion, I ended up on the phone with the producer for a “pre-interview”, which a person used to podcasts might not have experienced – basically, the producer conducts almost an entire actual interview to determine whether or not you’re retarded. If you’re not retarded, you get to go on to an actual interview with the host, at some point down the line. Most shows can’t afford to rent a studio, much less throw a human being at you to spend an hour interviewing, but when they do this, it generally means you’re dealing with a top tier organization.

As I said before, I get pulled into Archive Team representation a lot right now, but for the past half-dozen years or so, I’ve actually been on a secondary mission/goal – to spread and share as much of my life outlook and learned lessons to as many people who are prepared to receive it. To that end, I’ve tried to share with other like-minded compatriots whatever it is possible to share, so that my ideas and the things I care about outlive and outreach me. It’s a nice goal.

And that’s why I was in a studio in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest Festival, to speak about Archive Team with the NPR “On the Media” show. And why I brought along Duncan, one of the Archive Team members who happened to also be at South by Southwest. Here’s what the studio we were at for it looked like:

I was trying to show Duncan how the pros work, so he could learn how to react quickly to whiplash questions and clarification requests from one of the bigger names. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

After the 20 minute delay getting started while we cooled our heels (and by the way, the engineer for our session, David Alvarez in the window there, was pro beyond pro and a pleasure to work with), we were finally connected with my interviewer.

I should have sussed out what the next 35 minutes were going to be like when the VERY FIRST part of the conversation went this way:

JASON: Hi, how are you doing?

BOB: (Pause) I’ll be a lot better later.

What followed was a stumbling, barely coherent host jumping all over the place, and peppering questions of all variant quality, interspersed with commands to his engineer/producer, the kinds of things you generally want to say POST interview. Not here.

I think the best moment, however, and one which thankfully didn’t make it to the final cut, was when we were discussing Archive Team’s proactive methods, Bob told the story of OJ being arrested for threatening someone at gunpoint over his own property and going to jail for years, and asked how we’re different. Nice one.

Anyway, I was mostly sad after all this because I could see how disappointed Duncan was. I’m not saying they made Duncan cry, but what a better use of our time if we’d been in the place of greatness. We were not.

Is the final work a nice one? Yes, someone in the On the Media organization edited the hell out of that thing. Does that mean I should shut up and take it? Nah. I’m telling you how it went down in the event that someone else gets Bob on the wrong side of the bed one morning and thinks it was them or their fault. It wasn’t.

If I have to give one piece of advice I’ve learned over the years of dealing with news media of all stripe, it’s that you get all kinds. The ones who respect you and make the audience informed about your subject while adding their own insight – those jewels should be given your respect and time. (Kim Zetter, call me, we’ll do lunch.) But if you find yourself on the ass end of a paddling for nothing other than a lazy or distracted or resentful scribe, hang up or resolve never to deal with them again, if you don’t realize it until it’s too late. Trust me, there’ll be others.

Hey, I warned you about reading further!

Dreamhost is all that.

I don’t have any desire to go into the full details, other than to say I watched my dreamhost accounts get compromised, I watched test directories I set far apart into new users get compromised, and as my site would regularly get taken over for google-bot-oriented spam, I could then see the pain, the misery, the sadness of trying to figure out what I needed to do. Counter this with the fact that when the chips were down on several occasions, Dreamhost kicked me so hard into the curb my forehead still says “protect our rivers” backwards, and it just came down to “oh, I really gotta get out of here”.

Finally, while I was getting some very nice and kind attention from Jeff Atwood on his Codinghorror website, the machine this was hosted on went down, and then it came back a day later, and the load has been 112 or greater on that thing since then. I don’t care about the excuses; the site flat out stopped functioning. It was dead.

Well, they did it – I’m gone. I still have stuff over there, but the march has begun. If I have anything in my defense, it’s that when I started with this 9 years ago, things weren’t so bad. But like all shared hosting, the bloom comes off the rose and the next time you look up, your head is being slammed against the footboard and there’s nothing but slack-jawed dimwithood when you try and make things better.

I’m now hosting with TQhosting, who have been hosting the main textfiles.com site for years now, to perfection. Sorry it took me so long, folks.

Let’s get back to writing, shall we?

It’s about 20 minutes, uses a bunch of CC-SA music, and combines probably 20-30 clips from various voicemails, conference calls and the like from the audio.textfiles.com website.

It’s a little strange, a little jarring, occasionally transcendental. I guess the best name for it is “Listen!” because that word shows up a few times in there. The influence of the Negativland KPFA show Over the Edge should be obvious. And if it’s not… you should really check out the Negativland KPFA show Over the Edge!

Enjoy it with my compliments.

Listen!

Five months later, I want to share a working protoype.

So, with the caveat of it only working in the Google Chrome browser, of it only showing you a single Colecovision cartridge, and of it having no sound or keyboard input, allow me to introduce to you the working prototype at:

http://jsmess.textfiles.com/

If it doesn’t work for you, then I’ll tell you it looks like this:

The rest of this entry is just discussing the details, the repercussions, and the plans for this project. Summary: FUCKING AWESOME.

Obviously, the half-dozen people working on this project weren’t spending all waking hours in the last five months on getting us to where we are now. In a few cases, weeks went by as people lived lives, or we were waiting for someone to get off work, or just the occasional miscommunication and “oh hell, I thought you were doing the git push” sort of thing. The main project discussion, for a long time, has been here, if the nuts and bolts of the shared development project interests you.

The primary push has been to use the Javascript converter Emscripten to port MESS over to Javascript, and making that happen required a lot of bugfixes, some on the MESS side but also on the Emscripten side. It also required modifying makefiles, disabling assembly language routines, and bumping into all sorts of oddness. The primary developers of this whole project have been Justin de Vesine, Alon Zakai, and Justin Kerk, although there’s a lot more who have stuck their noses in in various fashions. Some stuck their noses in to tell us this was all impossible; the less said of those folks, the better.

The resulting Javascript file, mess.js, is 16 megabytes. Due to modern browser capabilities, it is pre-compressed down to 2 megabytes for transfer, but then it expands, and we run into the current situation that this sucker horks a ton of RAM. (In fact, it appears this does run in some versions of Firefox, but it really wrecks it when doing so, so I’m not going to count it.) This is, like I said, the prototype. We’re just working to make it function, and then we’ll expand back into making it function well and be much more efficient.

What’s important to me is that the prototype, the proof-of-concept, is an emulation of a Colecovision running a homebrew cartridge, Cosmo Fighter 2, by Marcel De Kogel. It’s a Colecovision running in a window! We chose Cosmo Fighter 2 because it kicks into a demo mode immediately, needing no keypress, so you can see the scrolling starfield and the text and the general speed of the thing right away. It bodes well. Obviously, as we head upward into more contemporary systems (the MESS emulator emulates such late-model systems as well as really old ones), the slowdown going through javascript going through a browser going through an OS may in fact be legitimate murder. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with the fault-finding.

What we have here is Pat Crowther yelling “We Have Cave!“. It’s Neil Armstrong going “Holy shit“. It is a seriously big deal and it’s going to get bigger.

I think people forget how we used to tell people how things sounded and how they looked. We used to tell people this new song was really awesome. Now we can not only link to that song, we can link to a specific part of that song. And we might have said we saw something funny or amazing on a show, and we can now embed that specific event right into a webpage, and show them. OK. you probably sort of get how incredible that is, or at least that it happens, but sit back and think again what that does: it means that items of a visual and audio nature are as ubiquitous as the words we used to describe those items. This song is awesome; listen to how awesome this song is. This dude is fucking hilarious on this show; see how hilarious he is. Or, if your bend is more academic: this bird emits a unique cry; here is the cry it emits. The algorithm results in a very interesting outcome – come see the algorithm’s visual result.

As we press forward on JSMESS, the Javascript MESS project, we’re proposing to do the same to computing experience. We’re going to make things that happened on computers into an embeddable object on computers. Yes, you can certainly download a disk image, download an emulator, run the disk image on the emulator and then be able to see an old program run, but that’s a lot different than, say, putting up 10 windows in a webpage where if you click on any of them, you can immediately see what every major spreadsheet program on the Apple II looked and felt like. It’s nothing near as awesome as being able show you how Print Shop developed over the years. Or let you see, side by side, how the Atari and the Apple version of a program behaved. Once we’re done here, it’ll be trivial, a calling with a few options, a pittance of effort. The experience of any moment of computing in the past 50 years as an embeddable object. And once we’re done with that… then we can focus on the really amazing stuff.

While the team has things under control right now, it never hurts to have a few more people hang out and see what’s going on. The work is being discussed on the EFNet IRC network, in the channel #jsmess. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, that’s fine. I’ll keep you appraised of future milestones.

Everything’s going to change.

It’s going to be very exciting.

Naturally, one might be inclined to look at a massive project one did, like a two DVD documentary on text adventures, and instead of remembering how you got there and how hard you worked and everything else, just see the flaws. I’ve had GET LAMP flaws held up to me on several occasions, actually many occasions, but I’m not overly embarrassed by them. They’re good flaws, the flaws that come from sticking your stake in the ground and hitting all your goals.

Besides the “focuses on North American text adventure culture and industry” flaw, which I was forced into with the footage and budget I had, there’s the “interactive version menu is fantastically clunky” flaw. I am happy to live with that one because as the DVD format sunsets out, I at least reached for the potential that was supposed to be baked into the format. But it’s hard to deal with and doesn’t work in all DVD players, and so there it is. (This is why there’s a “non-interactive” version – I just punted, hit the CTRL-FUCKIT keys, and made sure people could enjoy all the footage. I always play the non-interactive version when I screen the movie.)

There is one flaw I don’t abide by, and there was no way to see it coming.

The GET LAMP documentary DVD set has a couple secrets in it. A couple standard DVD-style easter eggs, of course, and the packaging has one, but the one that I’m talking about is the Infocom documentary. Here it is at the bottom of the main menu:

Somehow, and I blame myself, GET LAMP became in many eyes the documentary about text adventures that is the main mix but the Infocom documentary is almost never mentioned. But it’s far and away my favorite! Unlike GET LAMP in the main, Infocom (it’s called simply “Infocom”) is a very focused, very time-oriented and explanatory documentary episode, clocking in at just 50 minutes (technically 47:05), that lays out Infocom from start to finish. It is, far and away, my favorite part of the DVD’s materials. It’s a pretty straightforward piece of work, yes, but the amount of respect I have for the Infocom people and their unique place in history comes through everywhere. Sure, there’s negative things some people say, and it does get contentious here and there, but I really feel I did that company justice in that episode.

The way things are arranged, Infocom just hasn’t been something people focus on when they discuss GET LAMP, and that’s all my fault. Regardless, it’s the kind of film I’d like to see about a lot of game companies, although I don’t know how many we’re going to get.

More than that, this episode has a hilarious commentary track, with Stu Galley, Mike Dornbrook, and Dave Lebling, recorded at Mike’s apartment. I love that thing! Hanging with childhood heroes of mine, having them all interact and chum around, and drop some great trivia. I turned a personal profit on the whole project right there – it didn’t matter if I ever sold a copy.

But my whining about this hidden jewel aside, I wanted to mostly respond to an event happening out there that’s getting attention: The Double Fine Kickstarter. (I am actually kind of sad that this name refers to a fundraising venture, and not, as it should be, a drink involving twice-strained tomato juice, caffeine and vodka.)

No, the Double Fine Kickstarter was the using of the fundraising platform Kickstarter to fund a point and click adventure. They asked for $400,000 in 35 days, made that in eight fucking hours, and landed at the astounding amount of three million. Kickstarter had never had a million dollar funding before, but now they have three, this, a comic book reprint, and an iPad holder that barely squeaked into the nine-digits-club before close. And here’s the big thing: it’s to fund a point and click adventure.

Now, point and click adventures show up nowhere in GET LAMP mostly because I didn’t have space to go all the way through every derivation of the text adventure medium that came in the decades hence, but point and clicks have a strong heritage in such and for some people represent the fog-filled trailing edge of their gaming childhood. So it has been a pleasure to see so many people step forward with an interest to have a new one made… including myself, who funded at the “give me the documentary and the resulting product” level.

Therefore, let me take this moment to address the idea of an Infocom Kickstarter.

“An Infocom Kickstarter?” you say. Well, believe it or not, the concept has been mentioned to me in multiple forms, in various ways, throughout production of GET LAMP, and especially once we saw the Kickstarter concept really take off, and seriously getting into my face upon the release of the movie and Kickstarter being used to fund really wild things, computer game wise. The plan, roughly, is:

1. Get the Infocom People to make another Infocom Game

2. We play the Infocom Game forever

Rather sketched-out, really. All ready for the details. So allow me to answer it.

First of all, the idea of pulling infocom implementors out of cryosleep and giving them the ability to make another text game was done: it’s called Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. If you can imagine a performance by an established musician who’s 30 years into his career, the approach was the same: you have the warhorses doing the rough outline (in this case, Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn), while the talented younger staff does the heavy lifting (in this case, G. Kevin Wilson). From my interview with Marc Blank, he made it clear that it was a few weeks of work for him and Berlyn, along with some follow-up concalls to answer questions or add additional material as needed. This is how it went, and how I would think any future work with the original implementors would go.

I don’t think any of the creators have lost their touch – every one I talked to for the movie was bright, engaged, hilarious or thoughtful as per personality, and would no doubt be a joy to hear from in a creative manner, be it text adventures, or, frankly, a Q&A session. Faced with the challenge of writing something new, and with someone else assigned to do the dreary pick-up work with coding/development, they’d all be fine at it.

Here are some problems:

First of all, time. Multiple implementors have moved on to pretty time-consuming jobs, meaning they couldn’t just blow months working on a project, or even weeks. While a lot of the aspects of making a text adventure have been sped up (especially for QA and playtesting, where programs exist to jam through and find bugs at amazing rates) the whole ‘writing and composing puzzle’ thing would be a pretty involved experience for them, so they’d have to work on it when they could. Some are retired, certainly, while others are not involved in jobs that would prevent them from, say, blowing a few weekends on the project. I say this, fully aware that Kickstarter provides the role of Deranged Millionaire, who will pay untold sums for an infocom game, whether reality would allow one or not. I suppose everyone has their price, and faced with a hefty fee, the Infocom imps would probably be convinced to spend a little time working out some craft to make a text game, especially with the aforementioned “heavy lifting by younger staff of devs” approach.

Next, the resulting product would very, very unlikely be anything like an Infocom game as people know it – the characters and the worlds are still technically owned by Activision and they’re unlikely to loosen up any grip on them with wasting an enormous amount of money of good donating people, money that should go for, say, a gold limo for Steve Meretzky. Perhaps a game where parts of it are each lorded over by a specific implementor, say, a swamp section done by Stu Galley and an insane asylum overseen by Amy Briggs, might work. There was only one game under Infocom done in anything close to that model, and it was Bureaucracy - and I’m going to pull from my informal conversation with infocom writers to tell you that game was truly and completely hated from the inside.

I’m not saying the whole thing is a terrible idea that could never come to pass; I am pleased that we now live in a miraculous time where it’s not just possible, but feasible to raise the funds to convince the infocom alumni to go for it.  But I question what the whole idea of an “Infocom Game” truly was and is, and whether what came out the other end would satisfy the wishes of those for whom those two words are magical.

There’s my two cents. discuss.

So, here’s a compromise.

There’s a movie coming out in just a few weeks or thereabouts. It’s called Going Cardboard, or The Board Game Documentary, and it’s directed by Lorien Green, who set off a few years back to film a movie about Euro Board Games (or Designer Board Games), the people who play them and the business behind them, especially the designers.

So, I didn’t make this film. I didn’t come up with the subject, didn’t decide who would be in it, what parts of the story would be covered, any of that. This wasn’t a movie I was making anytime soon. Or ever. But Lorien wanted to, and she asked if I’d consult. So I did, mostly giving advice here and there, and then, after she’d cut together a rough edit of the movie, I went in and did another few rounds of editing and polish. This week, we’re doing the mastering of the DVD, and then it goes off to the waiting packages that were printed a while ago. The packaging, by the way, includes a new board game by legendary designer Reiner Knizia, who appears in the movie as well as a whole host of characters.

Again, this isn’t my film, but it was definitely hooked up to the Jason Scott Machine. It has my influence here and there, and from the premiere people have already commented it has the same feel as one of my films. So there you go, a solution.

Besides buying Lorien’s film when it goes pre-sale, You should consider this option available: If you want to make a geeky film and ask for advice, here I am. If you want me to edit it or do intense work, I do charge and want to get some level of paid, but I like accomplishment-based pay, so we can chat.

I’m likely never to do the subjects that people want if I’m not already doing them (although who knows what the distant future brings) – but I can help others who want to approach them. It’s not hard to make documentaries – it’s just a long marathon and not everyone wants to run it.

Until the e-mail buzzes, I’ll stick to my load of three at once. Production began officially earlier this month, and there goes a few years of my life. Oh, and sorry for burying the lead, but there’s now a new weblog called documentary.textfiles.com that covers my work with production of these films – people who invested want updates and it’s probably not good for ASCII to get clogged up with it going forward.

See you in the docs.

It was made by people trying to fundamentally change how this internet thing works, in ways that it can’t possibly. Granted, a lot of people have given up internet for internet-like things, but bear in mind that a single cellphone, that is, one individual’s cellphone, running 4G, has greater bandwidth than the Internet Backbone did in the early 1990s, and you see how far we’ve gone in so short a time.

A lot of people are talking about how the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a piece of crap, and it is crap. I don’t have the interest or the taste in going deeply into that, because people who are much better at being all legal-wrangly-nutty can do it. No, I only want to speak to one thing, and even that is mostly in the realm of preservation, my big passion these days, and by “these days” I mean “that I’ve been alive”.

When what we think of as “Domain Names” started up, it was a volunteer side-effort of registering names, one done by hand and totally unreliable in terms of turnaround. You can say what you want related to what came next, but they were kind of Bad Old Days. If a domain was offensive, or they were busy that week, or anything else, you had to basically hope the forces mixed together and you got your domain name. The process of changing domain names, of doing a lot of other domain-related transactions, was weird, slow and stupid. Somewhere around there, I got my COW.NET domain, which I still have.

Network Solutions were slow-moving, unresponsive, dull assholes.  Network Solutions also had a defacto monopoly,  and once they started charging for domain name registration, you got better response, and they got a fuckton of money from domain name sales, and domains weren’t cheap. Let’s be clear about that: $50 a year.

A decent enough showing of how weird those pre-money times were is in this 1993 Wired article.  Joshua Quittner’s a bit of a toolbox but the article serves the function, so there you go. Wild and wooly, slow, and unpredictable. And after the monopoly kicked in, it was wallet-rape city – remember, Verisign bought Network Solutions in 2000 for 21 BILLION DOLLARS.

So imagine when the monopoly was broken, and a chance arose for someone, especially someone like me who’d been doing domain names for nearly a decade, to get domains much cheaper, that is, $8 a year. Well fuck yeah! Thus I and others started going to these other domain registrars, doing our best to make sure they were in some way legitimate. I went with two: EasyDNS for stuff I cared about, Go Daddy for stuff I didn’t quite care about.

So, EasyDNS is fucking perfect. Let’s leave it at that.

Go Daddy was mostly a case that they were cheap, and their interface was somewhat easier to use, especially compared to Network Solutions. Network Solutions had done some sketchy shit in the past, in one case utterly breaking DNS. At the time, if someone had put a hammer in my hand and gave me a free flight to their offices, we would have had quite the news story. In this environment, anything looked better, EasyDNS was expensive (but awesome!) and the domains I only somewhat cared about went to Go Daddy.

DNS and domain name garbage are like funerals and busted water heaters. You don’t want to deal, when you come into problems it’s usually under duress, and when it’s all over you stop thinking about it until the next time.  Such as it has always been with me for Go Daddy.

Most of the time, with Go Daddy for me, it’s been “Oh, I need to register something hilarious (or somewhat hilarious – I’ve owned INAPPROPRIATELYDRESSED.COM or DISRESPECTCOPYRIGHT.ORG and many other things of that ilk), I don’t want to spend any money, I don’t care too much…. OK, off to Go Daddy.” Once I’m there, I’m reminded how much of their business is trickery, deception, misleading user interface, endless endless endless endless add-ons and attempts to make more money from you, and finally a shit-ball storage of your stuff. But in the end, the domain registers, it “works”, and I’m done, and I can go on making the joke site or whatever.

Somewhere in there, Go Daddy went from “bargain basement generic registrar” to “sleazeball make-ads-that-piss-people-off jingoistic hey look at me fuck you pussies registrar”. Now, as someone who did contract work for ROTTEN.COM as a writer and who uses “Fuck” as an adjective, I’m content with anyone being all controversy-and-tits and putting a stake in the ground, with business being gained or lost by those clear and present actions. It’s called “taking a stand”. T-Shirt Hell, which makes offensive t-shirts, had this schtick for years and has always kept that schtick – great. So it was with Go Daddy.

See, but now things have come to a head. It turned out that not only was Go Daddy happy to put their names supporting SOPA, which is a hell of a restricting, dangerous, and censoring law, but they’d helped to write some of it and, even more offensively, were exempted from it. In other words, they’d found a way to be as legally and liberty-crushing offensive as their ads and their posts and declarations were liberty-defending. In other words, hypocrites.

So, a bunch of people, including myself, are beginning to leave Go Daddy in droves. I have about 20-30 domains with them, and they’re all leaving. This process, you will not be surprised to hear, is somewhat laborious, with Go Daddy throwing ALL sorts of things in the way, including spectacularly crappy and misleading tricks (you unlock a domain to allow transfer by clicking on a menu called “Locking” and then unclicking a box that says “lock domains” and then hitting the button), and then a waiting period. Plus, I know better than to do all my domains through a process at once without testing it, so I’m only doing one minor domain first, going through the waiting period and then making sure it’s all kosher, and then off I will do the rest. Go Daddy may call me about this – I have a “celebrity” domain which they have a specific call center number devoted to. Really. And best of all, it’s Sockington.

But when they call, they can take a flying fucking leap. We’re done.

When the shit rained down from the world over the SOPA thing, Go Daddy thought they would have their legal counsel explain, point by point, why they were going to say Fuck You and keep supporting SOPA. They wrote a pretty massive weblog entry, actually.

Once people really kicked in, moving tens of thousands of domains off Go Daddy, well, then the fun began, and Go Daddy announced they were “reversing” their position, and that they still saw a need for certain protections, but SOPA was apparently not it, and oh fucking god please stop leaving us in such massive droves and please we’ll do anything you want goddamnit we have children ACTUAL KIDS HERE that need clothing and shelter and we went too far.

First of all, the best part was they’d still written the law, and were still exempt, and were still officially supporting it. All they’d done is made a new weblog entry to try and placate the mouth-breathers, the utter morons they think their customers are who think the tits-and-controversy image was fucking awesome and just wait for them to no longer care about this and we can all go back to the upsells and the deception.

So, in that way, they DELETED THE WEBLOG ENTRY DEFENDING SOPA.

And so, here we are, here I am, to say, FUCK YOU, GODADDY.

Here’s your lame-ass defense, permanently enshrined. Go suck a banana. My domains are leaving you as soon as possible. I hope everyone leaves. Go into the ground, put a plastic bag over your head, and play astronaut. You’re done.

The original weblog entry you hid:

And here it is as a .zip file. (A huge thanks to Vitorio Miliano for sending this along.)

Anyway, back to my regularly scheduled Merry Christmas.

Since oh, January or thereabouts, I’ve had this entry about Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary sitting around. I actually write most of these entries as drafts and let them sit, then come back and touch them up and do what you do with actual writing. The entry sat there for a whole year, and I just deleted it, as I’d realized something.

I’m kind of done being The Wikipedia Critic. I still find issues, and the landscape is rich with targets and self-important process lawyers and all the sketchy shit Jimbo Wales and other members have done over the years, but I am just kind of done being That Guy. The one who spends time after time proving a negative, showing the problems,  then indicating why the problems are problems, and then doing it forever until I’m in the ground.

You know, for the past week, I’ve been adding a mirror of Jamendo.com onto the Internet Archive – I’m more than halfway done, and the collection will be here. When I’m done, over 971 days (real, 24-hours apiece days) of music will be on the Internet Archive servers. I’m also adding out of print comic books, more computer magazines, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

In all these cases, I didn’t add things to then watch people change the content, the meaning, and blow down a bunch of legibility rules or linking policies to essentially destroy them. They’re items. They were made. They got scanned or recorded. Here they are. A much better week, in other words, than constructing cogent arguments about process. A much better week.

These days I’m the Archive Team Guy. I’m the Archiving/Preservation Guy. My speeches are still fiery, my rage is still in effect, and my boundless need to make things better and more accessible still burns bright. It’s just getting things done now. I like being this guy. I think I’m going to stay being him.

See you in the archives.

]]> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3451/feed 6 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3427 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3427#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:27:36 +0000 Jason Scott http://ascii.textfiles.com/?p=3427 I’ve now done two kickstarters, and maybe I should talk about what I know.

If you don’t know what Kickstarter is, then either you’re being sent to this weblog entry or something’s really gone out of whack, because I’ve mentioned the kickstarter campaigns I’ve run here extensively, as well as putting up the cute widgets telling you to visit.  But for the first group, let me say that Kickstarter is a site for “crowdfunding”, or “patronage”, or as some nimrods call it, “cyber-begging”.  It is obviously much more than that to many people, but maybe that’ll get you started. The Kickstarter site has a FAQ and a few minutes of browsing will have you caught right up.

I’m mostly writing this for people who think they want to start a kickstarter project, or have done one and want to compare notes. I encourage all manner of comments.

So, a quick disclaimer. I know these people. I don’t know if any of them would call me a friend, but I’ll settle for “knows exactly who the guy in the hat walking up is”. And I’ve walked up a few times, either at swishy NYC digerati gatherings or SXSW or what have you. It’s always been cordial. Additionally, during a specific stressful situation in my first kickstarter that I’ll go into, co-founder Yancey Strickler answered my frantic 1am-on-a-Sunday-morning tech support e-mail within 30 minutes, solving the problem instantly, and you’ll follow someone like that into a hail of gunfire after that. So if you read nothing else, let me say, stand-up guy. Also, I have no dirt on anybody, so there’s no dirt coming out in this. I’m just giving you the facts.

I had the idea for something like Kickstarter before Kickstarter, for what’s that worth. Faced with friction from my family about setting out to doing another documentary after BBS and realizing I wanted a $5500 camera to do it, I said that I could instead raise some of that from the world at large, and the “GET LAMP Adventurers’ Club” was born. Invest $100 in me, and at some point in the future, which turned out to be four years later, you would get three copies of whatever it resulted in. I intended it to be open for a month, but I had to shut it down after 50 people came forward waving money, pushing me to $5000 and making me nervous about how many copies I was preparing to give away (i.e. 150 guaranteed copies of GET LAMP). Looking back at everything, I probably could have kept it going, but 50 was a good solid number. Oh, and they got into the credits of the film as well. If this sounds similar to kickstarter ideas, well, this sort of thing has gone on a long time. I suppose I could draw some conspiratorial idea from the fact the CTO of what became Kickstarter was in that Adventurers’ Club, but come on – ideas are everywhere, playing them out into reality is a whole other business.

In fact, let me drop what I think Kickstarter’s main secrets of success are, in case you decide you want to rip off their style, like Indie Gogo did. (Indie GoGo, open before Kickstarter, looked like this for years and when Kickstarter ate their lunch and squatted it out in gold coins, massively reskinned themselves to look so much like Kickstarter than I’ve had people surprised to hear they’re not the same company.)

Kickstarter’s main secrets are Frictionlessness and Curation.

To know what I mean by Frictionlessness, let’s blow through 20 years of Web History in less than a few sentences:  We start with holy crap it all works, followed by a few years of what the fuck is this thing, and then that awesome how do we make money by the buckets off these assholes, followed by a multi-year situation in the mid 2000s where all the clever people who went through the first decade of web and were trying to find out what to do next started major noodling on all aspects of computer-human-data interaction, which flew into wild directions. And here we are.

There’s a whole range of thinking, a lot of which I personally identify with Caterina Fake,  where we go past this or that web technology and just get back to making a computer interface and program that does a lot of stuff simply. I’m dramatically oversimplifying here, ironically. But Fake and a lot of brethren in the Cult of Simple changed how websites were expected to function. Google had done something similar way back in a big way, and yes, Xerox PARC looked into it years and years before, but the Cult of Simple said that maybe people didn’t want a fucking webpage that looked like a 32-track recorder exploded, and just wanted to make stuff happen. I happen to think that Fake was right, and people listened, and stuff got much simpler to use even though the underlying technology got more and more complicated. Someone more interested than me in the prospect can trace where these ideas take root, but I suspect the SXSW conference and wayyyy too many BOF-like parties in San Francisco helped.

Kickstarter is off-the-showroom polished in this regard – the web pages are clean without being sparse, sharp without being oblique, informative without being overwhelming. It feels like french-kissing a Nicholas Felton chart while Edward Tufte snaps photos for his personal collection. All the integration is there – ways to shove in photos, videos and links from all manner of missing-a-vowel sites, as well as the ability to BOOM! WIDGET! at the drop of a hat. Text entry boxes you could park a Smartcar in. You’re not loading up a business plan spreadsheet – you’re filling in the big friendly spaces with your dreams. And it all just works.

So if you’re filling out a kickstarter project proposal, you are in fat city – it’s awesome and represents, I guarantee you, a billion grey hairs of effort on their part to make sure the gentle amusement park ride car slides silently down the track towards potential funding success. Assuming you can make admission. Which brings me to the second secret.

Curation. Kickstarter curates everything. When it started, it was invite only. I got in because I was invited by one of the founders of ROFLcon, and I don’t know how she got one other than knowing people from ROFLcon. So people knew people knew people. This went on for quite a while, to the detriment of “just anybody” being able to start a project.  It’s not democratic and it’s not nice and it’s not particularly going to lead to out of control growth, but it worked. People adding projects were, to at least some extent, people who would push through to the end and make something of it. I’ll be the very first person to tell you I lucked out like mad on getting on the ground floor of Kickstarter.

Like a television show, Kickstarter looks really straightforward and stuff just “works” but that belies the massive amount of curation they do, which I tend to call “meddling”. For the most recent kickstarter drive I did, a meddler showed up to question my choice of rewards, my funding structure, and a few other things. No demands, mind you. Just someone getting in there with me and sending along suggestions and ideas based on their research into what works and what doesn’t, and where I’d strayed from those known quantities.  I responded to the meddler politely and I was left alone. But I’ll bet someone who has no idea what they’re doing would really have appreciated the helping hand.

What I’m saying is that projects succeed on Kickstarter because Kickstarter helps projects succeed. That may sound simple, but one could look at something like Ebay, with its endless fraud issues, terrible quantity of users who come this close to ripping you off, and million pathetic attempts to get attention, and you realize how much great work Kickstarter’s people are doing to keep the shining city on the hill from getting that broken window. Those people are doing enormous work on this silent, not-obvious front, and don’t ever forget it.

I’m sorry one of the secrets turned out to be “do hard work”, but come on, you knew that.

Kickstarter has had a number of Supreme Successes, cases where shit went so crazy that people noticed.  It’s one thing to fund a kitchen for a brewpub. But when this Obama Design Book pumped $80,000 out of what seemed like thin air, that got some major attention, and when a wristwatch adapter for iPod Nanos made nearly a million goddamned dollars, well… everyone got that concept. Personally, nothing blows my mind more than the $3,000 Jellyfish Tank project that ended up getting $162,000. I mean, woah. At this point, pretty much everyone understands that language.

So now people are flooding into the site – Kickstarter happily let people know they surpassed one million credit-card-verified backers in October. Even with the curation, projects are flooding onto the site as well. And so it’s been the case multiple times, with friends and associates, that I’ve been asked for advice or insight into the process and making things “win” the kickstarter game.

I did two kickstarter projects, here and here. You can’t possibly do the first one anymore – looking at it now, it says “Please help me raise this money, and in return, I will spend this money.” It’s cushioned by also being a way to fund the final editing of GET LAMP, and in fact I later offered copies of GET LAMP at cost to backers. But still – I don’t think they’d ever allow that past the curation stage at this point. I’d have had to rearrange things pretty significantly.

But propose to fund me being me I did, and fund me being me they did. I asked for $25,000. I got $26,658. I spent that money happily and heartily, and here I am a mere two years later doing the things I love and living a life of dreams, so the money went somewhere good. And let me say that one of the thoughtful actions that turned the tide on that funding drive was Jeff Atwood’s weblog entry about it, which sent things skyrocketing to success. Hope I fulfilled the dream, Jeff.

These days, I get requests to “help” a kickstarter either before or after it goes on the site, and the request comes in from two disparate groups I will label thusly: pals and douchebags. Nobody who’s talked to me gets to ask which group they’re in, although I will say it’s a 95-5 split, historically, so you’re safe. Probably.

To everyone, I have the general talk I give about the idea of Kickstarter. It goes something like this.

• Since I was first on Kickstarter, they’ve changed how you get to join. It used to be invites, and now it’s applications. I am assuming your application got through. If you didn’t get through, there’s nothing I can do. If you did get through, then we can keep talking.
• Kickstarter is not a VC that you need to convince once and snowjob into success – it’s a platform that makes fundraising easier by giving you a sexy backend (read: the tufte-felton threeway from above). In a very rare case you might drum up support from just posting the thing. But more likely, you’re just making a cool way for people you know and friends of friends and your fanbase to come in. When I did my first kickstarter, I had something like a decade of what I’d call my current public life behind me. Influx of support came from that fanbase, not from free-floating individuals on Kickstarter going “woo hoo”.
• Generally, you want a goal number before you think of rewards. Ideally, it should be as little as possible while getting the job done.
• Every project has a sweet spot, the one people go for. If you’re finishing a documentary, the sweet spot gets a DVD and is probably something like $50.
• Products are easier for people to wrap their heads around than a precious set of individual “this level gets a PINK bow, THIS level gets a BLUE bow” bullshit.
• Provide rewards that are cheap for you and impossible for your audience to otherwise get. Example: autographed cast photo, phone call with you, drum lesson from you the famous drummer, personalized voicemail message from you the crazy getting a podcast funded gal.
• For fuck’s sake, make a video. If you don’t make a video explaining what people should expect and how much you care, you probably don’t care.
• Have a family friend or relative who has an account who can throw some cash in at the end if you’re just under. If it’s $150 that means the difference of getting $5000 or not, I mean… come on.  Consider this a break-glass-in-emergency thing, but it’s a fact.
• Amazon + Kickstarter will yoink 8 percent of what you make. Calculate that in, moneybags.
• Also, if you don’t “validate” your account with Amazon Payments, it will reject incoming money after hitting a certain limit. This is what I wrote frantically to Yancey Strickler, the co-founder of Kickstarter, one early Sunday morning, and in mere minutes he responded to tell me that I shouldn’t worry, just validate the account, and Kickstarter’s servers would try again. And so I did, and they did. Thanks again, Yancey.
• Like I said, Kickstarter will meddle at every level. They’re trying to help, don’t be a dick.
• The initial rush of people after you announce will make you feel like the most important person in the world. You’ll want to go outside and cheek-kiss hobos, you’ll be so happy.
• Somewhere after the initial rush, you’ll wonder what the fuck happened and you’ll kick a kitten.
• There are a group of people, and I have no explanation for this, who will only jump in after it succeeds. Kickstarter only pulls cash if the project succeeds, so this is silly, but there you go.
• “Kickstarter Project Starts” is a “Dog Bites Man” story in 2012. Sorry. Try and bite a few dogs, somehow.
• Once your kickstarter starts, the real-time updates of people investing will eat your fucking existence. You’ll try and live a productive life, but the real-time aspect of people giving you money will cripple you. Sorry about that.

After that, it tends to be custom advice, like brainstorming specific unique rewards, suggesting ways they might portray the thing, asking what unique aspects they can bring to a Kickstarter campaign. Generally, the pals appreciate that. The douchebags are already trying to figure out how many e-mail blasts to send to anyone in their address book over and over until they make goal.

Now, for the part where it gets weird.

For my last kickstarter, I broke as many rules as possible.

When I made the draft form of the kickstarter campaign, and set it at 100,000 goal, and saved the draft to work on other things back in July, I got a nice little e-mail from someone at Kickstarter who I won’t name, asking if I maybe wanted to make it, maybe… $30,000? And do just one documentary? Wouldn’t that be better? I kissed him on his nose and sent him on his way. Well meaning meddling.

I put up one of the strangest pitch videos you’ve ever seen. I still get comments about it. If it seems completely off-kilter and weird, that was the intention. It’s the Blue Velvet of Pitch Videos.

(For the cinephiles in the audience, the ending shot was directly inspired by the end of the Spike Lee joint “School Daze”.)

I did a single tweet (except for one answering questions): This tweet. I didn’t post in other weblogs, didn’t write in my own weblog, and didn’t do all the stuff you’re “supposed” to do, until much later in the process.

Within two days, the pledges passed $30,000.

About halfway in, I mailed everyone who had ever bought a documentary to mention the project (and the two documentaries, as people might have known about one and not the other). This juiced the pledge off onto success.

What I’m saying is, I don’t follow my own advice. Probably good to know before you take mine.

And that’s all I know.

(I actually enjoyed myself a lot at the various jobs I used to have, but it was rarely because of the job itself.)

I last posted that I’d added some materials to the archive back in September.  That list of periodicals and other materials is way out of date, kids. Let’s do a quick update.

• 80 Microcomputing Magazine
• A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing
• Acorn Programs Magazine
• Amazing Computing Magazine
• Amiga World
• Amstrad Professional / PC Soft Magazine
• Atari Computing Magazine
• Atari User Magazine
• c’t: Magazin Fur Computer Technik
• Color Computer Magazine
• Commodore Format
• Computer Age Magazine
• Computer Monthly
• ComputerKontakt Magazine
• The Magazine Rack (Collection of singular examples of magazines)
• Die Hard: The Flyer for Commodore 8bitters
• Elbug Magazine
• Electronic Games Magazine
• HappyComputer
• Home Computing Weekly
• LaserBug
• LED Micro Magazine
• Magazine ZX
• Micropendium Magazine
• Midnite Software Gazette
• The Gamers Collection
• The Games Machine
• The Transactor
• TV Gamer Magazine
• The Computer Journal
• Crashed Newsletter
• Asgard Newsletter
• Texas Instruments Users Newsletter
• The Coco Clipboard
• ZX Mushroom Club
• Apple Hebdo
• Up Time Newsletter
• Super 99 Newsletter
• Australian National OS9 Newsletter

So there’s another thousand magazine issues for you to paw through.

“What, is that it?” you say. Archivist, Please! 

How about some french-language computer magazines? I got a huge ingestion of those a while back, and I’ve been steadily adding them the last couple of months. They include:

• Amiga Dream Magazine (French)
• Amstar Magazine (French)
• Atari 1ST Magazine
• banzzai-magazine
• cpc-magazine-french
• Cyberstratege Magazine (French)
• French-Language Computer Magazines (Miscellaneous)
• Generation 4 Magazine (French)
• Hebdogiciel Magazine (French)
• Joypad Magazine (French)
• L’Atarien Magazine (French)
• L’Ordinateur Individuel Magazine (French)
• MEGA Force Magazine (French)
• Micro et Robots Magazine (French)
• micronews-french
• netbug-magazine
• PC Novice Magazine (French)
• Player One Magazine (French)

There’s plenty more to add (over 100 different runs) but that’s ongoing.  Spanish and German collections are arriving as well.

But who the hell wants to read, you say. What you want is some sort of software.

Yeah, on that as well.  In the Shareware CD Archive I’ve been curating,  I took the thing from an embarassing 35 CD-ROMs to the current count of roughly 761 CD-ROMs, including a massive collection of FREEBSD installationCD-ROMs courtesy of a donor from the Noisebridge hackerspace. They were going to be turned into wall art, and someone on their list said “Maybe swing those by Jason, first?” so here we are with a pretty much complete set of CD-ROMs from FreeBSD version 2.0 up through 5.4 – a motherlode of unix and programming history.

Way back when I was working on the BBS Documentary, in fact, before I was even shooting, which makes it around 2001, I knew that I needed a lot of help on the back-end when it came to research.  So, besides reaching out to Slashdot, I also brought in a lot of friends and made myself very available. This availability went on through the entire three years of shooting. One of the ways was a mailing list called “Co-Sysops” where I had a bunch of computer types who knew their stuff, and I’d fling out an obscure question like “What was the highest baud you can make a USR do” or “Does anyone know who wrote X” and then, more often than not, people answered. One of the people on this list was Brian Dear.

It would be really good to present the scale of the endeavor. With no previous major filmmaking experience, I had assembled a 500 person list of “possible to interview”, hundreds of my own “definites”, and, over the course of filming, sent out something like 3,000 e-mails. Really. The resulting epic was, in my mind, a miracle that it actually happened. And to this day, I get mail from people stumbling onto it online, or through the website, or any of a bunch of other ways, and the general consensus is “oh wow”, with a dash of “wtf”.

Now, during this time, Brian Dear explained he should be one of the people to interview. He lives just outside of San Diego, and twice my travels took me near there, and on two occasions, I mailed him about an interview. No response. Again, keep in mind he was subscribed to the Co-Sysops list, which itself had me going “I’m heading out to ______ for a week to film.”. In other words, he had an enormous amount of chances to make it happen. I was very confused by this all at the time.

So the movie finally came out in May of 2005, a happy time all around for me. Happy, that is, except for one or two annoyances, specifically, a spontaneous appearance from Brian in the comments about the CD.TEXTFILES.COM project, where he says:

“Still mystified why Jason seems to have decided to exclude the whole Coconut story from his BBS Documentary. The Coconut era (COCONET, CocoTalk API, CocoMedia; radically different software from everything else on the market at the time — client/server architecture; EGA/VGA graphics only, with eventual Mac/Win support; first BBS to offer embeded graphical emoticons, which are now so common on web-based BBS’s); Unix-based, not DOS/Windows based) is an important chapter in the whole BBS drama, and no matter what the excuse, his history project will remain incomplete without coverage of it.”

What a twerp!

ANYWAY, the reason I bring this up is because Brian has his own little favorite subject, that of the PLATO system, which the BBS Documentary does mention and which is quite an enjoyable little history of its own. Enjoyable enough, in fact, that Brian decided to write a book on it.  In fact, he’s been working on this book for years and years and years. In at least one bio he claims 20 years of research, although if we’re going to play that little game I’ve been doing BBS research for 32 years.  Regardless, he’s been working on it for FOR-EVER.

For years, the only updates on his regular site about this project was to mention when someone he’d interviewed had died.  However, he eventually did come out with a date: the book would be released Fall of 2010.

Well, it’s 2011. In the time since Brian slammed me for having an incomplete history of BBSes, I shot, edited, and released another film and now I’m shooting three more. The Computer History Museum has switched from the Visible Storage structure they had to an amazing, world-class museum setup of their materials. (I got a tour this year. Trust me, it’s worth going to if you’re within 100 miles of the place. A 1000 miles!)

Why am I saying all this? Like I said, it doesn’t help me all that much as I work on all the stuff, but every once in a while I see this dude’s name, I see that the book covers something other people haven’t covered, and something in me just snaps. The world is full of people fat-fingering their cheeto-stained keyboards with how you’re failing to be perfect, not achieving your potential, and that you shouldn’t have even tried.  The advantage of them all dying in a fire is how long the fire would burn.

Hopefully this book will come out soon – I’ll be sure to get a copy.  Until then, I’m going to get actual shit done.

With three documentaries being shot at once, I didn’t want to skimp on the equipment, and I sure didn’t: A Canon 5D Mrk II, with a collection of L series of lenses. I got a great microphone, and because it’s not really wise to use the audio that comes with the camera itself, a separate digital recorder.

If there’s one thing I would inform anyone getting into shooting something like a documentary, it’s this: you really have to know the equipment cold. And the way you do that is to shoot dry-run days of something nearby and repeatable, be it a friend, a backyard, a pet. I chose a friend. Chris has a couple really nice manual typewriters, so we decided he’d set up a workstation in his living room and we’d do some shoots over an afternoon.

The resulting film is this:

You can go to the Youtube page here.

There’s no scripting or pre-planning, and I’m just talking with him and coming up with where to go next. All told, I shot about 30 minutes of footage, recorded 40 minutes of audio. I could have made this three times as long (we did discuss typewriters a bit), but I just wanted to show people where I was going with the look, the feel, the approach to the filming.

I think there’s no question the new equipment looks better than GET LAMP did, although GET LAMP looked much better than BBS Documentary did. Obviously there’s a lot more to a documentary than the pretty shots and the sound, but it sure helps when I’ve gotten a rare interview with a historically important figure to know they’re going to look really, really good. Also, the camera setup itself is very small and light, so readjusting things for a different shot is quite trivial, as is recording sound all the time during a shoot to get statements in between camera shots.

One critical thing to mention, to anyone reading this who will use a camera and sound setup with separately recorded sound, or multiple camera angles, is a program called PluralEyes.  To synchronize up even a handful of camera shots and recorded audio would be tedious and prone to error – in the case of my shot footage, the software synchronized all my video and audio in 40 seconds. I can’t recommend this program enough. It’ll pay for itself in a day of work.

Here is what the editing arrangement looked like for this relatively short film (I continue to edit in Vegas, Version 11 nowadays):

If you look along the bottom, you can see the whole timeline from start to finish. The greyed-out track is the original camera audio, which I don’t use in favor of what was recorded with the Zoom H4N digital recorder and the Seinnheiser microphone. Places where there are two tracks are audio are where you hear the typing in the background.

Even though this is a basic little film, it has over 40 editing points. I probably spent an hour putting it all together.

The workflow is different, but I think it’s obvious this new set of films are going to really look fantastic.  Here’s hoping.

Oh, one last thing: Chris Orcutt is a full-time writer, and he just completed his newest novel, the first of a detective series. Called A Real Piece of Work, I devoured the thing in two days and loved it. When he sells 1,000 copies, he’ll release the second in the series, so I have a vested interest in letting as many people know about it as possible. You can read up about it at www.dakotapi.com.

I like to think one of the real distinct aspects of the technical documentaries I’ve done so far are the cast lists – the list of interviewees that I pull from to get the story the documentary is aiming for. In more standard situations, the cast lists tend to be rather small and have a few “big names”, a couple “experts”, and then a whole lot of still frames. I don’t work that way. BBS Documentary had 205 interviews, GET LAMP had about 80. I suspect that the three new documentaries will have at least 300 interviews, but who knows how it’ll all shake out.

(I successfully got funded, by the way. Thanks, everyone.)

Oh, and the places they’ll go! The worlds I’ll combine, the subjects that they’ll cover! It’s going to be quite an amazing spectrum.

To help myself, I have a number of utilities and tools to keep track of things. Among them is something I call the Cast Constructor, a very simple shell script that lets me make a bunch of flat files with potential names. It’s very much a sketchpad, and not meant to be a definitive list, or a fully accurate one, or ever a complete one. It just lets me get some ideas out.

All three of the documentary sites now have cast sketches. Here they are:

http://www.arcadedocumentary.com/cast

http://www.6502documentary.com/cast

http://www.tapedocumentary.com/cast

I’m opening up these to the world much earlier than I normally would, because of several factors. First, I want to share as much of this approach I’m doing with three concurrent documentaries as much as possible – I don’t know if a single person has ever attempted this before. Second of all, with such a massive spectrum of potential subject matter, I want to invite people to mail me at cast@textfiles.com with cast ideas. It would help me a lot if you added the word “CAST:” to the subject line of your message.

People have been writing in like crazy, and I’ve been adding folks as fast as I can, often to the detriment of details. Over the next few months, I expect all three cast lists to expand greatly in size. Not everyone will get interviewed, not everyone will even be contacted – but this is one of the ways I try to improve the production, by letting people tell me who I should interview before I start shooting, and not in the lobby of the theater.

Have fun brainstorming.

By my very, very rough estimation, I probably engage in about three thousand transactions related to my projects in a given year. This consists of people who need information, people who want me to send them something, people who want to send me something, and so on – the normal back and forth of doing what it is I do. (I’m not counting mailing out the DVDs of the documentaries – that’s pretty basic.) Some of these transactions are as simple as responding with a number, and some of them are taking possession of materials and doing stuff with them. The latter take longer.

Most of these, I get done somewhat quickly, enough that I get complimented for it. But that’s definitely not the guaranteed situation – I’ve had cases of months getting back to people. I apologize, I try to make up for it somehow, but it does happen. I owe probably a half-dozen e-mail interviews, a couple pieces of hardware need mailing, I promised I’d get back with ideas about someone’s new business or to answer a tough question about the proliferation of various types of media in backup processes…. a bunch of stuff.

Some of this is just me wanting to get stuff right, and some of it is just some minor aspect, my saying “well, I can’t just leave it at that“, and then weeks go by.

Somewhere a ways back, I had a bunch of people involved in the Geocities Torrent, where Archive Team had generated this 647gb collection that uncompresses to about 900gb, and which basically requires a hard drive of its own to really keep a copy of. Some people started torrenting it, and we also ran into some hilarious case sensitivity issue.. and, well.. anyway, so all of it is now up on archive.org if you want a copy. (Hint, it’s huge.)

A number of people mailed me hard drives, about 10. I put a copy on their hard drives, and then mailed them back. Except one.

He was supposed to mail it in February, according to my records.

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 13:55:46 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

sounds good... give me a mailing address, I'm headed to the post office
shortly anyway...  I'll drop in a label and money for return postage, much
appreciated.  I'd be mailing a 1gig external usb... I'll delete any data,
but the only data is from your torrent download anyway...  

But things being what they are, he ended up not mailing it until a month later.  These things happen.

Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 15:58:00 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

Hi.. I completely forgot to ship this, put it in my trunk, then forgot it.
Anyway, shipped now (see attached).  However in my haste I forgot to put in
a return label/postage/and something for your time.

Have you got a paypal addy?  If so I'll send some cash there.  If not, I'll
send out a money order, let me know.  Have a good weekend.

Best, Tim

The drive arrived on March 7th.

This drive was in a slightly different form factor than the others, and at the time I didn’t have a dock to put it into, so no way to really read it. I did eventually buy a dock, but only recently. Money was pretty tight for a while (I was unemployed) so I couldn’t really put anything towards a dock and the rest, so the project kind of laid dormant.

The hard drive owner, Tim, mailed me about it, a couple times. I’m sure if I looked at that whole mail spool at the time, I was doing literally dozens of other things.

Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:24:45 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

so what's the status of things?

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:35:49 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

no word?  This is surprising, thought all was cool... Am I going to get the
stuff or not?  Offered to send you some paypal... what's up?

Long time now since the HD arrived.  I'd appreciate letting me know what the
status is.

Tim

“Long time” in this case was 11 days. Not long for me, and as I guess I indicate next, I was also travelling at this time – I had just spent a week at GDC 2011, and was about to go spend another week down in Austin, TX for SXSW, and had spent no time at home between them. So things were now out of sync.

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:50:51 -0400
From: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>
To: Tim

Traveling, back Sunday.

Here was my first mistake, because even if I was back Sunday, I was then stuck not only catching up with a pile of things needing my attention, but I was now going to start employment, and dealing with more travel and projects coming up. I’ve gone from being able to get things working on something like a hard drive, and doing the transfer of material, to heading down a path of more and more complicated projects. I am, in other words, fantastically busy.

Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 18:00:30 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Assume you're back and have been back.  What appreciate the status please?
Tim

Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2011 23:31:28 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

this going to happen, or I shall chalk it up to life experience?

Here is, looking back, where it goes off the rails. Something about the tone, combined with the work I’m doing, and the whole situation, means that the priority this whole thing has, to go out and get the dock and find the hard drive with my copy of the torrent on it, and then to do the copy, and all the rest, drops noticeably. I’m focused on a lot of things, and something about “chalk it up to life experience” just makes my face scrunch. My mistake was then not just sending the drive back, saying “ah, look, it’s just taking forever”, and then knowing it would be up on archive.org soon anyway.

No, instead of that, I end up doing a non-committal “mmmmm”, e-mail style, which means “Look, yeah, I’m going to get to it, but I’m in the middle of a lot of stuff and I can’t set aside the day to set this all up, OK, just relax.” but probably comes off as “yeah, yeah”.

Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2011 00:40:48 -0400
From: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>
To: Tim

It'll happen.

Now in the low priority bin, Tim is left to flail. Again, my fault. And here, well, here you can watch what happens.

Date: Tue, 3 May 2011 16:04:12 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

my 30 day check in... any updates? T

Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 20:19:40 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

so now I don't even get a reply?  If it's not going to happen, then
please return the HD so I can put it to use.  I'm not certain at this
point if you're simply too busy, have forgotten me, or it's something
else.  You are the one that suggested your doing this, I have not
asked otherwise.

I need the files, my HD or pay me a fair price for the HD and keep it.
 Any of the three, but c'mon man, no word is just not right.

T

Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 17:41:50 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

I won't bother you again then... IF (and I doubt it) you want to do the
right thing, get in touch.  I've lost faith in you and this, so keep the HD
and the files, I'll find a Unix guy and get the torrent myself.  I really
thought you were honorable (doing the torrent and all) but WAY too much time
has past, this is a very sour deal.

Enjoy the HD (life lesson for me).

Tim

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:29:01 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Happy July 4th... As the fireworks explode... think of all the honest, good,
hard working Americans who lived and died for this country.

Then think of those who NEVER follow through, who make promises they never
keep or intended to keep, who take merchandise under false pretense, who
ruin the integrity and spirit of the net...

Have a good weekend.

Tim

Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:48:02 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

just thought I say hi and let you know I haven't forgotten you.  One day...
in some way... you will be repaid.  Dishonesty is too nice a word for
you...  Have a happy holiday season... NOT.

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:03:47 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Happy holidays thief.  Hope Santa chokes on your cookies.  

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:10:43 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

see you on kickstarter, I'll be sure to follow you  CLOSELY.. and help
out with comments whenever I see your name online.  $100k... yet you
rip me off, hard to believe.  .

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:14:44 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

ah ha... I see Kickstarter has a link for "reporting projects"..
wonder what I can stir up by pasting our long thread... we'll see if
you respond or not. Sweet dreams. Tim

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:16:46 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

even better.... think I'll donate $10 so I can comment about the
project... social media... love it.

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:39:13 -0600
Subject: kickstarter project
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

This is Tim, the guy whom you do not answer at my main email (
XXXXXX).  Here are two options.

*1.* Return my money via paypal (it seems you have PLENTY of money now).
The money I speak of is the cost of the hard drive I purchased and mailed
to you (at your request).  The cost of my postage to send it.  The
frustration you have caused over a LONG period of time.  We'll call it $200

or

*2.*  I will do my utmost to share our complete and long thread with
(including many quotes from you saying you would fulfill your promises)
with the Kickstarter administration as well as becoming a small partner and
sharing my comments (and links to the full thread) in your section.

Your choice, all I want is to resolve this

To be clear... at this point I am ONLY interested in the return of cash,
the hard should remain in your possession.

You may use XXXXXXX as the Paypal email and IF the funds are
received promptly, this will bring this matter and our communications to an
end.  If not, then (see #2 above).

Best,

Tim

It’s an interesting study, to say the least. I’m hardly blameless, and the whole thing going off the rails as far as it did is definitely my fault. But the gentle traipsing into blackmail and sinister threats are also prime demotivators to following through, so I decided to split the difference. Post it all here, let you see how not every person who deals with me is 100% satisfied, and then, when I get back to my home office later this week after Thanksgiving, find the drive, mail it back, and never think about it again. Perhaps not the best solution, but about what I’m into doing, all things considered.

And to my other friends who I owe a few things for, I’m sorry for the delay. It happens.

I’ll do my best to improve.