ASCII by Jason Scott

This interview was conducted by leahpeah.com last week.

The original is here: http://leahpeah.com/blog/interviews/jason-scott/.

Jason Scott, creator of Textfiles.com, has created an archive that is constantly growing and changing. There are always people sending in new files for him to place into the massive collection he started from nothing. Work of this quality is only found in labors of love. Part of the reason the archive is so huge, and continues to grow, is that the people contributing to it were at one time a part of a community much larger than themselves and welcome, very much so, when a person comes along and sets up a place for that community, or the shadow of it, to reside again. It feels a little like home.

For someone such as myself, who loves interviewing people and finding out what makes them tick, I was pretty much in heaven while I watched his first set of films, BBS: The Documentary, in which he speaks to over 200 people about their involvement in BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems). He’s a journeyman historian, yes, but not just that. He has a wonderful and insightful way of getting people to open up and talk about something that is, or was, so important to them, to their lives. He then puts the stories together in a way that makes sense, even for someone like me that had very limited knowledge of what having a modem meant prior to the Internet. I suspected that I would enjoy viewing it, but I had no idea that I would heart it so much. I eagerly anticipate the next two films he is simultaneously working on, Get Lamp and Arcade, even if they also take twice as long to create as he first thought. It’ll be well worth the wait.

Blog Birthday:

I kept a weblog before a lot of people, over here. So December 17, 1997!

Why do you blog?

These days, it’s several factors. For one, I have essays that don’t really fit anywhere. I used to have a “thoughts” page on textfiles.com, but it limited me to discussing the direct files on textfiles.com, and that got a little weird. Then I became a “guest blogger” on boingboing and got such a wildly positive response from people, I decided it was time to get myself a separate site, and ascii.textfiles.com came in.

What do you talk about?

Computer history, life lessons I’ve learned, things that amaze me, my own history, things that make me sad.

What don’t you talk about? Why?

I avoid politics discussions when I can because all it does right now is foster conflict and hate without any resolution. I keep my political actions elsewhere.

Worst/best experience regarding something you wrote in your blog or put out on the net?

All of my entries criticizing Wikipedia have caused enormous crap-storms that make me sometimes wish I’d never opened my goddamned mouth in public. It also confuses people to have this historian guy “against” something, which is how it’s usually interpreted, that I’m “against” Wikipedia. In fact, I’m against implementation choices in Wikipedia, choices that they themselves are starting to undo. It’s been a great time studying it, but jeez, come on, I’m more than a Wikicritic.

The best experience was the way my article about why I used Creative Commons shot around the world. It sold a lot of copies, but it also touched a lot of people.

Favorite/worst thing about living where you live?

I live in the Boston area. I enjoy the access to the wonders of New England, but I hate freezing. I would live in a warmer climate if I didn’t know it would basically cut me off from my family, who are very important to me.

When I first went in to look around textfiles, I initially felt overwhelmed. Is that a normal first reaction?

The site is kind of intended to be overwhelming. But it’s also an accurate reflection of what it is, a massive collection of files. I wanted to ensure it was all saved as well as possible. I created the “top 100″ so most people could just browse that and get the idea.

Did artscene come after the initial compilation of textfiles? Some of those files are the most interesting to me, coming from an art background.

Everything after www.textfiles.com came later, between 2 and 5 years later. The most recent is digitize.textfiles.com, which is scanned in ads and brochures. So it’s always growing.

Is there one thing that stands out regarding textfiles that you are most proud of?

I think it’s the best thing I ever did. It’s brought nothing but wonder for me.

What actor would play you in the movie of your life?

Either Bruce Campbell or Kevin Smith.

Do you think that your Wikipedia page speaks of you accurately and fairly?

Depends on the time of day, right?

A lot of it came from my own website. Some of it is incomplete, or inaccurate. Some is correct, and accurate. Whenever I get in the news about my wikipedia criticism, it gets modified a lot.

What do you do to stay sane and healthy?

Well, I try and eat right and read a lot. And make documentaries.

Did creating the BBS documentary take longer than you anticipated?

Yes, when I first started it, I thought it would be 2 years and it ended up being 4. So double my money. I wanted it to be 9 hours, and it was 5.5. But I thought it’d be 2 DVDs and it was 3.

Did it turn out how you hoped?

It came out even better than I’d hoped. When you work on something like this, you never know what’s coming out at the end, but this was a great final work, and it was all worth it.

How has it been received?

It’s done well, with thousands sold and many more downloaded. I paid off the costs of the film within its first month of release. But hey, buy more. www.bbsdocumentary.com.

Will you do anything different this time around with your new projects, Get Lamp and Arcade?

The best things I’m doing differently with the next two is to film it in HD and be more focused with interviews. I’m less worried about being the one and only source on these subjects. With the BBS one, I was often that very thing.

As for how it ends up, why guess? I hope it’s good. It all depends on who I can get to sit down with me.

Why do you make documentaries?

I make documentaries because I feel like I’m doing amazing good talking to these people. It never gets old.

Favorite color:

Blue.

Favorite food:

Swedish Meatballs.

In your opinion, what is the best application/widget/program or helpful-bit-o-code to come out over the past year?

A program to make my HVX-200 High Definition video camera work with Sony Vegas (my favorite editing program) because the Sony people are too bull-headed to make their software work directly yet. So this other guy went out and created Raylight, which does this work. That’s great. It was worth the $200.

Do you miss TinyTIM?

I miss TinyTIM as it was up to about 1997. Very much so. I wouldn’t trade those first seven years for anything.

When you were 10, what did you want to do when you grew up?

Make movies.

What do you hate?

Little tiny kings ruling in little tiny kingdoms that they think you’re standing in.

What do you love?

Making a difference.

What are you thankful for?

I have had the same well-paying job for a decade, allowing me the freedom to do all the rest of these things.

What do you want to tell other bloggers, if anything?

If you’re not generating original content and just regurgitating other links, then machines are going to replace you.

Astounding facts about you:

I’ve seen ‘Caddyshack‘ over 120 times.
I read every Agatha Christie novel in 30 days when I was 25.
I learned to drive when I was 26.

Are you Windows or Mac? Why?

I’ve been windows and mac at various times, as well as Atari, Commodore, and Apple II. It’s whatever worked for me. Right now, I run Windows XP with a collection of UNIX boxes doing the heavy lifting downstairs. I work best with PCs.

Do you cook?

If scrambled eggs count, hell yeah.

What are you working on right now?

A documentary about text adventures (www.getlamp.com) and a documentary about arcade games (www.arcadedocumentary.com).

Your own favorite post or essay you have written or contributed to?

I was very very happy with the Creative Commons post as mentioned above, but I’m also amused how a recent one about a lonely childhood called “The Best and the Interesting” got some nice response from the world.

What will you being doing next year?

Still filming my two documentaries, doing talks, travelling.

Tell me a secret?

I lost one of my best friends over a stupid thing, but I’m not sorry.

What do you wish I had asked you that I didn’t?

What I was doing for dinner sometime.

Thanks, Jason! (and what are you doing for dinner sometime?)

Comments Off on Interview by Leahpeah

This weblog finally got a little thing attached to it: now you have to type in a keyword (it’s currently “ascii” but it’ll change) to post your comment. It’s a slight annoyance, relatively, with an extra weird step just to say something to me and to people who read this weblog.

But the fact is, I was up to well over 300 spammed comments a day on this weblog, and I nearly deleted an actual posting or two in the last week, so I finally got driven into this, or keep losing 30 or 40 minutes a day deleting stuff by hand. So I apologize in advance for the extra hoop.

Will this stop the spamming? No, but it stops the completely automatic, run-by-a-program-randomly-trolling-the-internet stuff. Which, like I said, was going to threaten to overwhelm my weblog.

People giving me the down-home spamming where they come on and jump my little hoop to sell you something, they’ll just have to get me deleting them back by hand. Like the good old days.

This is nothing like my e-mail situation, where because I have a very old domain (cow.net) and a few other high-profile domains and something like 10 years on the internet, I get over two million spam e-mails a month.

Is there a solution to this situation? Regardless of what people selling you stuff say, the fact is, no, unless you use some level of whitelisting, that is, you open up a tiny fractional vetted list of people who you wish to interact with and solely interact with them. I am not comfortable doing that, so I pay that price.

The flip side, though, is that people do neat stuff (interact, trade games, stream mp3s, and so on) without being totally crushed by outside forces. Spam will only go away when spam doesn’t work. Spam works, my friends. It works very, very well. Don’t think it’s being done for fun; it’s hard work being a 24-hour-a-day dick.

For my own bit, I’ve been watching cd.textfiles.com grow from my little funny site of CD-ROMs to an absolutely insane endless buffet by people coming on and downloading gigabytes a day. Gigabytes. One of the side-effects of there being over 130gb of data in one place is that statistically, some of that data’s going to end up having a use to somebody, somewhere. So multiply that by many thousands and I’m finding I’m showing up in “song searches”, “graphics searches” and so on, constantly bring crawled by Yahoo and Google (they can be very inefficient about it when they want to be) and sometimes just sucked dry by someone doing 30 simultaneous connections, like that’s going to speed things up.

I have stuff that, when you’re obviously connecting to me with many simultaneous connections, just blocks your ass out. I have to do it, or I couldn’t even do e-mail anymore. Someday cd.textfiles.com will get the same treatment as the main textfiles.com site or digitize.textfiles.com and live out away from my personal T-1, but right now, I watch the pain.

I was interviewed on FBILL Radio yesterday, through a Skype connection, and I had to shut off cd.textfiles.com to prevent my packets going to neverland. I watched the usage graph go to literally 2% of usage after turning it off for two hours. Popular.

I don’t get money for it. I don’t put ads on it, and people appreciate that and enjoy it, if somewhat silently. I think a lot of people just think these things are “there” for them, and don’t give a thought that somebody’s probably picking up the tab for their joyride. And you know, for most people, I’d prefer it that way. Why should everything be “brought to you” by some popsicle company?

But some people, I don’t know. They complain about my speed, they complain about me not having something they expect, and they demand I set things up a certain way for their convenience. Sometimes I can do it with no pain. Sometimes I can’t, and can’t wins.

For these folks, I have one thing to point out: the era of the website proving a point is starting to become history. Stuff is there because someone put it there, and if you get something without being bombarded by an ad, a pop-up, some malware or a credit-card form, somebody’s being pretty friggin’ cool. Tell them.

Heck, tell me. Your chance of your comment being lost in the spam just reduced for the time being.

5 Comments

I still remember her like it was just a day or two ago, instead of five years.

I was at a 2600 meeting in Boston. 2600 meetings are loose hacker get-togethers ostensibly organized or blessed by 2600 magazine, but which range wildly in approach, context, and usefulness. What they often serve as are ways to scoop up beginning technical folks and smash them headlong into a social scene they want to be part of but didn’t know how to enter. By having regular meetings, you are a sitting target for these new folks to find a place to be themselves. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not. I have been attending them off and on for 22 years.

She was new, or at least, new to Boston’s 2600 meetings. She sat down, black hair and dark eyes, and she quietly regarded everyone, occasionally engaging a couple people in conversations I couldn’t hear. I forgot what subterfuge I used to strike up conversation with her, but it was most certainly subterfuge and I didn’t know what we were going to talk about.

I still remember her pointed question, the result of an hour attendance in this food court with this rag-tag group of teenagers and 20-somethings.

“So.. what exactly do you all do?”

I started to burble out some generalized description of classic hackerdom, some half-hearted description of technical tinkering, and she stopped me dead.

“No, I mean what does everyone here actually do. What do they accomplish? Are they doing anything?”

This was not exactly the sort of conversation I was expecting, but hey, what the heck, let’s fly with it. I asked her what she was doing, hoping to hear either silence or something interesting.

She pulled out some photos of herself, on a park bench somewhere, covered in garbage bags and tied into some sort of bundle, with her feet in a bucket or some similar container. Her eyes were closed. There was someone sitting next to her on the bench, obviously a stranger, looking either bemused or confused, it wasn’t clear.

She talked about this art project she had done, where she had left herself as some sort of living sculpture at various parts of her previous city. She explained to me how she was trying to get people to open their eyes, to change the way that they looked at things. She thought that a technical group of people or hackers or whatever she thought we were would be able to give her new ideas, or team up, or do something. What she got was a bunch of quiet kids talking about what new crap they’d bought or some near thing they’d learned about.

She wanted action. She was getting talk.

She never came back to the meetings, and I’ve thought about her occasionally, because fundamentally, she was right. Talking is not doing, and planning is not doing, and sometimes even doing isn’t all that much in the way of doing.

One could laugh at Funny Bucket Garbage Bag Girl and dismiss what she was doing, but she had a plan of action, some theories on what it would do, and she had done it, and had results from it, even just photos. She had stuff, and she could show her stuff and incite others to either do better stuff or shut up.

I am, by some standards, an interesting speaker. I go all over the place, initiate non-sequitir, use profanity as humor and occasionally forget my place, but at the end I usually went somewhere. Some people hate that, some people like that. Enough people like it that I could probably just do speeches forever without breaking a sweat and continue to entertain.

But speaking is not doing. Criticism is not doing. Punditry is not doing.

One of the more interesting side-effects of my little sideline hobby of criticizing the Wikipedia project has been the evaluations of my character as a person, or of my intellectual stature, from people who know very little of my other work. To some folks, I’m just the guy who went off about Wikipedia and worked in the phrase “Katamari-Damacy-like Ball of Shit” into a supposedly intellectual overview. The reviews have been very helpful, but they’re just reviews of a performance, a classification or statement of my thoughts, unsolicited and distant, of the inherent flaws in the design of Wikipedia.

(On a side note, I’ve had the rare opportunity through this to feel the frustration of spending a year, on and off, learning a subject well enough to speak about it, and then watch as someone takes on the arguments with all the grace of muppets doing brain surgery. Normally I simply don’t throw enough energy in studying a subject to be able to mount anything other than a vague defensive position in discussion, and the potential to get “schooled” is great. Here, after my year of studying the subject, I’ve had to walk through a collection of forums, commentaries and writings where people obviously familiarized themselves with the first 8 words of every paragraph and then fired down the slope, guns blazing and helmet on backwards, ready to match wit. I say all this in my haughty fashion because 99 times out of 100, I’m usually the fucknut with the backwards helmet and the guns. It’s refreshing to get some perspective on the other side.)

Ultimately, of course, all most critics have done is provide a negation, a declaration of void against someone else’s efforts. While the rare critic is simply trying to provide context of a project or work in a greater timeline or schema, a lot of them are just whiny bicycle horns, uselessly bleating while others Get On With It. I kind of dread the possibility of becoming that.

So I’ve been doing stuff. But here’s the thing.

A lot of my stuff is very quiet. Very off to the side, a slow, incremental increase in data and collected material towards my general historial projects, including my websites and documentaries.

DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM has been growing, with more and more scans added every week. I’ve even written a bash script that generates an XML file of the new stuff being created. (Perhaps it was best you weren’t aware of that, so you didn’t have to hear the screaming.) I’m about to add some additional ways to browse the scans so that people can find what they were looking for a lot easier… at this point, there are 562 scanned pages!

This past weekend, I added some footage to the arcade documentary. I think you’ll agree with me that these screengrabs of some of the footage looks pretty good. I also made some contacts for future interviewees for that project.

And this past Tuesday, I drove down to a ferry, rode across the Long Island Sound, and interviewed the creator of what was eventually called Choose Your Own Adventure, Edward Packard. He wrote a book called Sugarcane Island back in 1969 that allowed you to make decisions in a story. You would turn to page 15 if you wanted to enter the cave or turn to page 20 if you didn’t. You either go “huh” or HOLY CRAP when I tell you that I spent a great day with this gentleman, interviewing him and enjoying a nice meal with him discussing the GET LAMP project.

That’s a very special kind of doing, and I feel blessed to have gotten the chance to do it.

I’ve been mailing out constantly to potential interviewees, and there’s sessions planned all this year. I’m still trying to contact even more, and expect to have well over 100 interviews for GET LAMP and who knows how many for ARCADE (ARCADE may outstrip BBS Documentary, but you didn’t hear that from me).

I’ve got a half-dozen interviews in the can. I’ve nailed sound and visuals to where I don’t have to sweat them out like I used to (but I still have to concentrate). The equipment and I have a little agreement going, and we’re a good team now. I am working. I am doing.

Films are generally slow-motion things, ones like mine even more so. Long after peoples’ interest flicker and look away, I’ll be interviewing, researching, editing. For years. It’s part of the deal, and one result is that people are just now learning I finished the “BBS Movie”. A few people have written me recently to suggest interviewees, even, unaware there’s two thousand of these packages in my attic.

I’m doing my little thing in the background, like others are, and at some point in the future, my film will bloom and flower and everyone will know about it, or at least a good number of people. At point, it’ll become obvious I didn’t just spent all my time tearing down Wikipedia or yammering about Funny Bucket Garbage Bag Girl.

But until then, I’m doing what I do.

Not just talking, not just criticizing.

Doing.

1 Comment

In case I show up in her article anyway, here’s my sum total of e-mail communication, in history, with reporter Katie Hafner of the New York Times:

Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:47:20 -0700
From: Katie Hafner
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Fwd: wikipedia story for ny times

“I miss a lot of beats in music, but make up for it in life.” — Zoe Lyon

Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 18:50:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jason Scott
To: Katie Hafner
Cc: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Re: Fwd: wikipedia story for ny times

Katie, I am not one of your fans and am not interested in discussing this or
any subject with you. I suggest writing to Wikipedia Review or Wikitruth,
who are professional critics of Wikipedia.

Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:10:22 -0700
From: Katie Hafner
To: Jason Scott
Subject: Re: Fwd: wikipedia story for ny times

all best,
katie

10 Comments

A friend of mine drowned on Sunday. His name was always “Dankaye” to me, but in fact it is Dan Kivel. He was in his mid-30’s. I am mentioning this because my weblog has a good page ranking, and mentioning anything here adds things to the search engines quickly. There is a site for him at dankaye.com, which has photos, archives, and some audio he recorded for my notacon radio project both this year and last.

I am very sad to know he’s not going to record another one. But we have 9 hours of him being himself, and that’s more than most people get of someone they knew and cared about.

2 Comments

I often go on pickup runs around websites, looking for the new textfiles or radio shows of the day, to add to either web.textfiles.com or its very loud buddy audio.textfiles.com. Like somebody browsing a flea market, I have some preferred items in mind, but I never shrink away from other cool stuff I happen upon and I try to take a policy of “no info left behind”.

So if I find a website with a hacker radio show and then see it links to a site with textfiles, I start grabbing the textfiles, the audio, the images linking them, and whatever else I can. Think of a big massive vacuum with me steering it around laughing maniacally.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a site, one of these weblog/forum/library conglomerations that represent the old BBS spirit in many ways, called BINARY UNIVERSE. And like I said, it’s a collection of files, some weblog entries, a forum, and downloads. Basically, it has many of the same traits as a bulletin board system used to have, and collects them all with the additional advantages of a color scheme and graphics, as well as faster transfer rate.

And in this website, there’s a collection of “lectures”, a set of IRC logs of people talking about various subjects, presenting them for others to learn from, and then logging them and putting them up for later reading.

One of them is an introduction to phreaking. (This is their copy, this is my copy.)

What we have here is a lecture given this year, just a month or two ago, in an IRC channel, with a young phone phreak trying to pass on phreaking history to another set, another generation of kids. I am so truly warmed to know that this is taking place, and to have a record of it.

The story has been beat up, compressed, changed up a little, with different emphasis and names switched, but it’s surprisingly accurate.

He mentions Joybubbles (Joe Engressia) and the 2600hz tone and what it does, but does not credit Cap’n Crunch (John Draper) with discovering it, which is quite accurate. He also doesn’t mention Mark Bernay, the Midnight Skulker, who was also a notable part of phone phreaking history and who has an excellent website of his own. He gets in a mention of the scene-busting magazine article, Secrets of the Little Blue Box, by Ron Rosenbaum (my copies of this article are here and here), tips a hat to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a vague way (spelling their names wrong) and then fires up through the advent of bulletin board systems, and the rise of phreaking “groups”, and then into the modern era.

Like a record left out in the sun, some parts are warped but you can make out a good amount of the story. And this is 2006. “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” came out in 1971, 35 years ago. Most of Draper and Engressia and Bernay’s major exploits involving phones date into the late 1960s, which is nearly 40 years ago. It is quite something that someone talking on the online version of a street corner, a trashcan fire, can wind together a story of relative accuracy dating back four decades and that there are others who would want to hear it.

Four years ago, I gave a talk on the “history of phreaking” or Phreaking 101, not unlike these kids, at PhreakNIC 6, a computer conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Here’s my speech and some information associated with it. (I should get that thing on archive.org one of these days.) In the same way, there I was, telling stories going back 100 years, likely warping the record a little myself, but trying to show the same tune. The people trying something new, the characters and people behind the cold hard facts, the pure fun that phone phreaking represents throughout its history.

Here’s to more trashcan fires.

1 Comment

As part of the research into the Arcade documentary, I paid a hell of a lot of money (three figures, let’s just say) for a rare book called “Drop Coin Here” by Ken and Fran Rubin, published in 1979. I got it because it has vital information on the real deep history of coin-operated machines and Penny Arcades, and, well, the Arcade documentary isn’t just about Ms. Pac-Man.

Anyway, in all the reams of debates, discussions, entries and general scrum that I’ve seen out about information wanting to be free, intellectual property, and so on, there’s one photo in this book of a 1900 coin-operated machine worth pointing out:

Yes, you read right, this is a coin-operated dictionary, providing you limited access to a book, before snapping shut, for the mere price of a penny.

Anyway, before someone starts going off on companies or individuals charging for the right to learn, read books, and so on, just keep in mind this sort of stuff has been going on for quite a while.

1 Comment

Back from a weekend of work and documentary shooting.

I spent Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival East 3.0, held in Wall, NJ. A good time had by all. I got to see some old friends, make some new ones, and meet some heroes, including David Ahl, who is truly one of the greats. He was the editor/founder of Creative Computing, a book author many times over, and a true pioneer in gaining interest and mythology around computers and computing in general. I saw some excellent exhibits, and even bought a few books for myself, some of which were relevant to the documentaries.

Also, I got to shoot a couple interviews. A little about that, and about a situation with filming that one tends to forget, and which comes back each time, and which I always make a point to talk about and then don’t.

As mentioned innumerable times, I tend to be a one-man crew on my shoots. This means I am doing the following:

• Interview subject greeter/handler
• Director
• Lighting Designer
• Cameraman
• Grip
• Sound Guy
• Interviewer
• Set photographer

…and probably another bunch, but let’s go from there.

Because of this situation, my attention is shoved in a lot of different places. I end up trying to focus on the quality of questions and the quality of the shot from the LCD screen, with some nod to making sure the sound is getting in there properly and that we’re going in good directions with the line of questioning, but that’s a lot of plates. A ton of plates, all spinning and me keeping them spinning.

What this comes down to, is something ends up being borked. And because I’m not able to keep full attention on all these relevant aspects, it’ll stay borked through most of the interview shoot.

This happened tons of times on the BBS Documentary shoot. Dozens of times. Boom mike in shot. Grating sound in background I didn’t notice. Strange behavior by interview subject. Interview subject stopping saying something really informative and jettisoned off into a tangent and never went back. Camera shook. Camera white balance was sucko. Out of focus. Me showing up in reflections or as shadow.

Now, this would be expected looking at stuff from a cold hard viewpoint, but of course that’s not what I have. What I want is a perfectly shot film, every image and person a pristine incredible cinematic triumph, going on for hours. With a one-person crew, this does not happen, not matter how expensive the camera is.

So I did two interviews this weekend. One is great, absolutely what I wanted, with interesting lighting, good sound, good subject matter, good round of questions. The other is not so great. Good sound, good layout of shot, but slightly fuzzy visage. This bothers me, bothers me big.

But the thing is, one can look at this as a “failure”, or you can look at what I did get properly, and go from there. In the case of my interview with slightly fuzzy footage, the fuzziness is only relative. Most people won’t notice it. Some will. It encourages me to add more images over that interview. It also encourages me to look at the shot and wonder how I could really jazz it up and work around that problem. In other words, it lets me move away from the shot as being the sum total of work and instead use it as a base to make the documentary’s look even more interesting.

For example, I might take that shot, which looks good but is slightly fuzzy, and then shrink it so it’s a block on the screen, and then around that block are scrolling shots of the stuff the subject is talking about. Interesting! Informative! Layers of imagery going by what would otherwise be a talking head!

But there’s always that sad feeling, that one of wanting it to be perfect. But there’s a lot to being perfect, and some of it are resources of money and crew that I simply do not have. And, like I said, luck plays into it. I’m still learning the aspects of the camera, and whereas in the old camera setup I learned that there’s this enormous noise floor with the equipment, which majorly pissed me off in the editing process, in this one it is hell and a half to get a solid focus going. It just is, and it’s part of the game.

What I am saying here, and what is part of the secret sauce of all this stuff, is just that some people look at my finished work, or other’s finished work, and go “wow, they really nailed it all along, and my stuff doesn’t nail it at all half the time”. That is simply not true. Remember, I shot two hundred and fifty hours of footage. That’s eleven solid days of footage. After going through it, I ended up with 40 hours of footage, representing 4,200 clips, that I thought even had a chance of making it in. This means that for every hour I shot, where I got up, went across the country, found the person’s house, talked with them, discussed stuff, set up the shots as best I could, started recording, interviewed them, and then completed, thanked them, and left…. four out of five times, I was not even going to consider using that hour after looking at it again.

That’s statistically. Actually, what it came down to was that there are interviews where I talked to people for an hour and I used one specific sentence. I can think of about 10 interviews where that happened. I can think of some where I only used a paragraph. That’s probably 60-70 of them. It’s the nature of how I do this stuff and how it works out.

There were about 5-6 interviews where I didn’t use a single clip. Nothing. Not a sentence, a shot, a gesture, a moment. Were these a waste? Hell no! I’ll be releasing the full interviews anyway (there’s a fantastic one up right now on archive.org with Mark Nasstrom that I’m really proud of) but the content and the editing I was doing just didn’t mesh with it so it didn’t get used. But it’s a great shot, good sound, solid stuff.

Two of my biggest (in terms of figure) interviews, Tom Jennings and Vinton Cerf, have major flaws in the footage. Not fatal, obviously, since I used them, but definitely sub-par things that happened. In the case of Tom Jennings, you can clearly see both the boom mike, and my shadow dancing along the wall next to him. In the case of Vinton Cerf, the cabinets behind him reflected, quite clearly, me. You don’t notice it in still frames and when my head isn’t moving, but as soon as I shift, you can clearly make me out in the cabinets. The whole time. In both cases.

The solution was that I cut and edited them as if things were fine, and then went in and computer modified the images to remove the boom mike and me. This increases render time but otherwise, it’s just another filter. This happened a lot, relatively, and there’s not much I could have done about it. The circumstances of the interviews, the pressing of time, and how I had to go about it all meant that such problems were likely inevitable. But if I’d decided that I needed to sink or swim the whole production on both shots being perfect, I’d have likely gone nuts a long time ago.

I mention all this because despair is part of the process, and using mistakes and unintended effects as jumping points to make your work even better than it was is also part of that process. There is a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor or the tape bin for a reason, and there’s a lot of stuff that gets on in slightly changed form because of it. So don’t worry. All those plates in the air, some are going to crash. Just don’t think the crashed plates are, in some way, a mark of incompetence or failure. They’re a result of the challenge.

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Two small ideas that didn’t warrant separate entries.

Best

A few years back, I found myself in downtown Boston in need of a belt. Part of the belt I was wearing had broken, leaving a rather important aspect of the buckle in my hand, and now I was in danger of making a scene. I walked along the sidewalks on this weekday morning, belt loop hiked in right hand, and headed in the general direction of my car to drive home, when I saw some sort of men’s clothing store.

Since this was downtown in a city, it was not a chain, but an actual single-name store, with granite facade and hard-to-see interior. I walked in because surely, these people had a belt.

Five steps in, I realized this was a place where people who did Extremely Important Things went to have special suits made for them to do their Extremely Important Things in. I figured right there that the belt was probably going to cost me a lot of money, but I really did need a belt.

The old man behind the counter, the only person and staff in the store, eyed me critically as I walked up in my loud Hawaiian print shirt and jeans, obviously not one of the usual customer set. I immediately said ‘I need a belt”, like I could divest myself of any further embarassment by indicating the exact item needed to make me leave posthaste.

He motioned towards a rack about 20 feet away with belts hanging off it, and I immediately turned, skipped over to the rack, and browsed through them, looking for one that might fit me. And then I heard his flute-like voice far behind me from where he still stood:

“Thirty-eight?”

I turned in absolute horror and fascination. Yes, in fact my exact waist size was thirty-eight!

When someone has been working at something, really working and striving to be better, they will reach this humming peak, this absolutely top shape they are capable, and people are capable of great things indeed.

While talking with Ward Christensen during my interview of him for my documentary, we got to talking about quality, and he told me the story of a hot dog vendor outside a building he was visiting in a city. He ordered a hot dog with mustard, and the guy grabbed a hot dog, slammed it into a bun, grabbed the mustard, squirted it across the hot dog and shoved the whole package at Ward, who paid for it and walked away.

He thought to himself “Wow, you would think the guy would be less slapdash about it” when Ward looked down at the hot dog and saw that the mustard was a perfect line exactly in the center of the hot dog from one side to the other. The vendor had done it so many times, that a perfect mustard squirt was like second nature.

My father was at one point the financial guy for one of the research centers of IBM, and he told me once that for quite a few years, he could be handed a spreadsheet of a project or business plan, and within a blink, he’d say “Fails in 2 years” or “Needs more capital” or any of a bunch of other evaluations that in earlier years he would have needed an evening of study to return. He said it was like looking at a painting or a car and just knowing.

This sort of skillset is absolutely undocumentable, impossible to claim, and when you see it in action it’s breathtaking. I seek out those experiences and they pop up at the most unexpected times.

While riding to work, I turned on the radio and I heard two people talking. Commenting, it sounded like. They were discussing some sort of legal issue, some sort of concern with rules. I didn’t pay much attention, but after about a minute, it started to feel weird. Something was wrong, very wrong. I didn’t know what exactly it was.

And then it hit me. The two guys were not stumbling, they were making brilliant points, they were disagreeing but not hostile, arguing but not raising voices, and hitting all the marks of top-flight educated conversation. What were they doing outside of a book? They were just perfectly talking, talking like people just do not talk, talking in a way that once you hear it you realize what dogshit passes for critical thinking in the day-to-day of our lives.

It was December of 2000. The person talking was David Boies. He was Gore’s lawyer before the Supreme Court and he was talking to the Supreme Court justices about the aspects of the law. They were being broadcast across radio without commercial interruption, so there it was, just a bunch of top-flight legal minds discussing issues. It was stunning for me. The best against the best.

My hope is, at some point in my life, I will hit such a stride, some skillset I have where the best of me just happens as a matter of course. I’m good at some stuff, bad at others, but I would love to hit some point, in a few years, where I throw out perfection as calmly as a child tosses a ball. It’s something to strive for.

Interesting

When such thoughts come to me, I sometimes think that if the person I was in 1981, the 11-year old Jason who lived in Brewster, NY for a few short years, could have been transported to my home in my 30s, here in my office, and spent just an hour with me, he’d just hug me and cry and cry. It was all worth it, he’d sob, before going back to his living hell.

When I announced digitize.textfiles.com to people and showed how I had reams, absolute stacks of all these brochures, magazine cutouts, flyers and catalogs, there was a lot of attention paid to me in terms of letters and articles about how it was nutty I had all this stuff 20-25 years after the fact. It was a point of interest about how I was scanning in neat stuff and what it represented in terms of historical context.

But there were no discussions that I saw about the fundamental question: Why did you feel the need to solicit and have reams of junk mail sent to your home of nearly any type for years on end covering anything and everything you could get your hands on? I am 11, 12, 13, and I am circling literally dozens of “send me mail” offers from every single vendor in every single magazine I can get my hands on. What is up with that? Once I point it out, it starts to mirror-flip into something more concerning than fascinating.

In 1981, I was living in Brewster with my mom and brother and sister. We were living one of those two-wrong-turns-and-you’re-homeless situations, where a number of inherently bad financial situations and cost of three kids meant that we just kept skating the edge of disaster, and my mom’s strong dislike of my dad meant that she would take the alimony checks but would steadfastly refuse to point out if we were really down money-wise on a given month due to unforseen costs (clothes, car repair). At one point we were all sleeping in the same room on the top floor with a kerosene heater in the middle of the room to make up for the fact all our heat was basically shut off. It was very bad, let’s just say.

Beyond this poor home situation, I hated my school. I hated the people in it, the teachers who taught in it, and the faculty who lorded over the kids like tyrants. I have no love for Henry H. Wells Middle School or Brewster High School and I wanted to be anywhere else. My knowledge of computers made me a source of ridicule, and my intense personality led to rumors and fighting that still fills me with horror thinking about it. I still remember the bastard math teacher in charge of computers, who distrusted anyone who wasn’t fully afraid of the Apple IIs under his control. Twice in my time in the Brewster School System I was given a negative grade for class participation to ensure I would not pass the course. He was one of them.

And I can’t overstate the boredom. Having no money to buy anything, not getting along with very many people, consistently finding myself “against” random sets of students at this school, I just had nothing. I had arcade games that I could afford a dollar for occasionally, and if I was really lucky, I could buy a computer game. From the time I was 11 to when I was 14, I bought 3 computer games: Preppie, Dneiper River Line, and Scott Adams Grand Adventure: Mystery Fun House. I very simply could not afford any others and had to pirate them to play anything at all.

But so much of my time was just spent walking aimlessly along roads, walking to school, getting lost, going nowhere. That’s how kids end up in gangs, or doing drugs, or just breaking stuff. You’re just so friggin’ bored out of your mind, and you’re in your own little self-imposed prison because nobody is showing you any way out. And then you do something stupid, something horribly stupid and everyone goes “you should have known better”.

In my case, the stupid was filling out reader service cards and having reams of stuff show up at the house. These colorful pamphlets promised a cool world outside my own, full of smart and engaging people, doing wonderous things that maybe I myself could do someday. And they were an escape, and I loved these things, and I’ve kept them like some people might keep an award or a picture, because their promises became my memories.

Here, 20 years later, I’m many things, but I’m never bored. My life is filled with interesting events, unusual e-mails, historical and salary-based work, and an ever-growing set of interests and experiences. When I became a person of means, I made sure to enjoy it to the fullest, meaning for a while I was living paycheck to paycheck on a very high salary, but damn, was I happy. I got involved in all sorts of hobbies and projects in late high school, college, and to the present day. My office here is filled with pieces of lives and writing and dreams and I look around each day when I come in to do stuff and I just love it.

My e-mail box is like a candy dish: letters from people I admired as a youth, letters from folks who I’ve been asking questions of, and letters from others like myself researching history or involving ourselves in wide-ranging projects, who need my input or assistance or questions answered. Every day, it’s amazing what comes down the line at me.

The 11 year-old me, if he knew this is how it would end up, would have simply thought: So it was all worth it. And it was.

TEXTFILES.COM has now been in “business” for about 8 years. That time gets behind you, but most notably, this period of time is enough for there to be kids who my site represents an institution that has been around as long as they’ve been online. They could be on the computer at 10, and now they’re 18, ready to go to college, and they realize all the time they spent, with money or without it, browsing all these files. And they write me.

TEXTFILES.COM is many things, because it’s so huge. It has writings by professionals, adults, companies. But more importantly, it has writings by kids, teenagers, people who, like I was, are bored out of their minds, waiting for something to happen, anything, ready to go in whatever direction life tells them to, unaware that the best thing to do is fuck the starting gun and just start running. But they read the files here, written by others like themselves, and they realize the potential out in the world and next thing they know, they are running.

They find me in e-mail, at conventions, at presentations of my film projects. And they tell me how much of a difference I made to them.

I’m sure at some point that will stop being interesting.

But I don’t think it’s going to be anytime soon.

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This is probably going to confuse things horribly, but the word’s getting out and I might as well put up an explanation of what it’s all about before I start reading “explanations” by people who don’t know me.

I’ve started another documentary. It’s called ARCADE. I have a website up: arcadedocumentary.com. It will be about arcades. Not so much about games, which has been done quite to death, but about the actual places, the come on inside to the flashing lights and drop some money into some skill games and you’ll lose your money but have a great time places that have been around for about a hundred or more years and which have included various types of machines ranging from skill cranes to pinball to pachinko to skee-ball to shooting galleries to video games. I expect this one will be quite a while in filming. It will be in high definition. I will be interviewing a ton of people.

So leaving that aside, the natural question is “What happened to GET LAMP, the documentary on text adventures you’ve been talking about for months????”

And the answer is I am still doing GET LAMP. In fact, I am primarily doing GET LAMP. Anything else documentary or computer-wise is secondary to GET LAMP.

I envisioned possibly doing some documentary about arcades some time back. I even did some small bit of checkaround research on them. I was much more entranced by text adventures, of course, since that’s a pretty big challenge and there was a lot to consider in making a video documentary. So I’ve been working on GET LAMP and occasionally doing some inquiries regarding the arcade stuff.

What changed? This camera I got, mostly. Ten thousand dollars is a metric assload of cash, and while it didn’t kill me financially, I didn’t know it was going to be the price of a Hyundai with extra trimmings either. I love the image it produces and it’s real easy to work with and once you buy into the whole P2 card thing on the HVX-200, then you really enjoy working with it. But so much money, so quickly, was not what I was intending to spend.

And really, within a year, the thing will already have lost significant value in terms of cost. I’ll probably be able to buy the amount of stuff I did for half the price, and have it be better, and all the rest. So really, I’m in this interesting position as regards time.

So, I’ve begun shooting the second documentary, ARCADE. Any time I don’t arrange an interview set for GET LAMP, any time I’m waiting on people responding, any time I could potentially lose a day of work on GET LAMP while waiting for ducks in a row, I’m going to jam ARCADE work in there. It will be a shadow documentary, the night shift, the guy who uses the office and the photocopier when the company’s closed. This doesn’t mean it won’t be good, just that I will not turn down an interview with an Infocom Implementor because I need to go find some shots of a pinball machine in a bar.

In terms of research, I found out something interesting involving text adventures: there has been a hell of a lot of good work done on that front. I mean, an amazing amount. With Bulletin Boards (and my producer would like everyone to be reminded to buy 10 copies) I had to self-start a lot of the research myself. There were smatterings of coverage about them and a lot of in-depth pieces on specific parts, but doing the whole 25-year story (and longer) and combining it into a timeline and chapter set and repository of information was insane work, involving many hours a week for months on end. By the end, I could say that I am honestly the world expert on bulletin board systems. I can get my ass kicked in specific areas, certainly ones where people personally played a part, but after 20 years of observing/collecting for what became textfiles.com and 5 intense years of study and interviewing… I got that stuff handled. Hire me as a speaker the next time you need a dash of BBS history for your corporate event or children’s birthday party.

Not so with text adventures or arcades. I am not the expert on these and will likely never be able to shine the shoes of those who are. I have enlisted the help/advice/confederacy of some of the people who have done years of research. I hope to enlist more. Unlike, say, trying to find all the different BBS software packages was a big deal that not many people were doing, a lot of people have worked to put together ultimate, exhaustive, amazing collections and lists of any program ever out for sale (or just distributed) that resembled a text adventure. People like David Kinder, Stephen Granade, Nick Montfort, Dennis Jerz, Andrew Plotkin, Graham Nelson, Emily Short, David Glasser, David Cornelson and many others – names I have learned very well in the past half year – forget more about Interactive Fiction and text adventures on the way to get a cup of coffee than I will ever know. I will be able to pipe up if someone asks for history and current events in interactive fiction and I will spell a lot of names and places better than the average person, but I will never be “the top expert”. Instead, I will be citing an awful lot of people, and an awful lot of web pages, and an awful lot of good solid work done before I ever turned on my camera.

Similarly, the discovery regarding arcade games is very well documented compared to the BBS Documentary. There are lots of explorations, overviews, photos, and stuff out there that I can pull from over time. I am not worried about being the only guy doing research. Organizations like the Video Arcade Preservation Society have many members and are doing amazing work.

I’m not saying I’m going to slack off or anything; expect the usual insanely anal Jason Scott work on these two projects. I’m just saying I can swing them together, allocating my time properly.

So there we go, it’s out in the open. Now everyone knows.

Now let’s get to work.

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