ASCII by Jason Scott

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.

2 Comments

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.

17 Comments

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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For the first time since I started selling the documentary, I’ve actually added products to the order page. I’m interested to see how that goes.

The first product is not mine, REALLY not mine. It’s a DVD-ROM of ANSI and regular Artscene material, compiled and put into one place by RaD Man of ACiD, who I’ve been working with a lot for the past few years, ever since we met during filming. We’ve become really good friends and help each other on projects.

And because I am RaD Man’s buddy, I can be blunt: the name sucks. It’s called “Dark Domain”, which makes it sound like a first-person shooter expansion pack. It’s not. It’s just a big huge collection of ANSI art, artpacks, music, and graphics crated by one variation of the “Art Scene”, the online BBS-based (and later Internet-based) set of art groups and artists who would compete, trade, and involve themselves artistically. I’d have called it ARTSCENE like I did with the episode of the documentary, but it wasn’t my choice.

Silly name aside, it’s really cool. I own a couple copies, and RaD Man went off and had a bunch made, along with some nice cover art and professional printing. Naturally, he has totally lost his shirt on these things because they’re such a weird sell. So I offered to throw it up on my BBS Documentary order page, and if people feel like it, they can order it along with the documentary as a “gift pack”.

This brings up an interesting situation, though. The DVD-ROM is, by absolutely any definition, “shovelware”, a classic form of product from the days of sudden increases in disk space, when companies were compiling work done by others, putting it all in a pretty package, and selling that package. So really, they could convince themselves (and did!) that they were a legitimate business who were doing a “service” for the world, but at the end of the day, they were bottom-feeding parasites who would pull everything into something they could profit off of while compensating nobody.

So I was back and forth about this.

Naturally, some amount of the artscene hates, just HATES Dark Domain, because it is that, a product, something sold. On the other hand, a portion of the artscene absolutely hates my documentary, for a variety of reasons that’s probably worth another essay/entry at some point in the future.

So I did two things. First, I put it up for sale. Second, I shoved the entire contents of the DVD-ROM online for free unlimited distribution, just like the original material was.

So, if people want to see what’s on it, it’s over there. If they want to take some stuff or even all of it for their own copy without giving me a dime and in fact costing me money, then they can. Or, they can go for the pretty package and buy that, for either $10 or $15 depending. Really, up to everyone. I’ll pay attention to feedback on this from all quarters.

The second item is spectularly unusual.

I am selling empty boxes of my documentary.

And I’m not even a con artist! It says right so on the order page that you can buy entirely empty BBS Documentary boxes for ten bucks! What the nuts, you say.

When a place prints up DVDs or other media by the thousands, they often have overstock or understock. This means that if you order 5,000 copies, you might end up with too many or not enough. Naturally, the place only charges you for what you ultimately got, so if it’s less you pay less. But if it’s over what you ordered, they just stop at where you are or maybe go a little over and charge you what you were told. To think of it another way, imagine that you order a bucket of water but they have to use this high-pressure firehose and fill it from across the room. You hold out the bucket and they let loose. It’ll either be too much water in the bucket or not enough. And then you settle. I swear this is how it really works.

The upshot of this is that there were 5,000 copies printed of the BBS documentary but more than 5,000 packages printed. Recently, I was contacted by my printers that they had boxes of these packages sitting around, and did I want them? I did! So they were shipped to me and I now have a couple hundred slipcovers and boxes in my attic along with the rest of the stuff. So I’m selling them, at $10 a pop.

Why in the world would you buy an empty box? Good question! I have only the vaguest idea! However, it costs me nothing to offer them out there, so they’re up on the page. Here’s some ideas I can think of:

• Replacements in case you keep taking your current copy of the documentary into the shower
• You want to dupe them and keep the dupes in the coolest storage case ever
• You downloaded this documentary off Bittorrent and want to store the copies somewhere neat
• You want to play a VERY MEAN PRANK on somebody
• You want one case with my autograph and another without
• You want TWO cases with my autograph
• You want TWO HUNDRED AUTOGRAPHED CASES

If you want the last one, send me some mail and we’ll make a deal.

Let’s see how this goes!

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When I was younger, there were a number of things which seemed just beyond cool when my friends or the promotional material would describe them. Around 10th grade in high school, I heard that there were these things called “Bio-Spheres” that would be little closed-off ecosystems that would maintain themselves and you could watch all this life going on inside, without having to do anything. That sounded absolutely cool!

When I was 29, I happened to be at one of those mall stores that are filled with fake rocks and globes and “nature”-related projects, and I saw they had these Ecospheres for sale! I immediately dropped the cash for one of them, which had algae, some branch, and about 5 little shrimp in them. I took it home and kept it.

I didn’t initially name the shrimp, since they didn’t really have personalities… except one. One of them would just whip around the sphere like a damned maniac, and then stop on a dime. I called him “Spaz”.

Over the years, the shrimp died. One of them died within a week, but the rest did pretty well, and lasted a year or two. But by the second year, I was down to two. One was Spaz. The other barely moved at all. I called him “Dullard”.

Dullard and Spaz lived their little shrimp lives together, checking for food, going through sleep cycles, and the rest. I, the friendly and benevolent owner, would check on them every few days, or maybe every few weeks, just to see how things were up. Life was generally good; lots of algae, lots of place to move, and so on.

Dullard died about three and a half years in. I found him there, pretty much gone, and then he joined the ecosystem like the others had. Spaz, apparently, was unfazed. Or maybe he was. We didn’t talk much.

He was my favorite pet ever, because he didn’t need me and I didn’t need to check on him. He just needed a little light, a little warmth, and he was all set. I’d sometimes check on him and there he was, speeding around the sphere, flitting this way and that, and then hiding away. He was less expressive than a fish, but still, I couldn’t help but like the little guy.

I started working on my movie, bought a house, did all the things a human does to convince themselves they’re not also running around like idiots in a big sphere with an ending coming at some hazy point in the future. Spaz didn’t like the move to the house but otherwise was A-OK with the shelf he was on, near a window, living the way he does.

This morning, I discovered Spaz had died. He did it, like he did everything else, quietly. He must have just given up, old age getting the best of him. I’d checked on him just yesterday, and he’d not been acting unusual, but maybe he wasn’t feeling too good.

Since I don’t know how long Spaz was in the store, I don’t know his age, but he appears to have been between six and seven years old. Since the Ecosphere documentation/manual said that some “have been known” to live for five years, Spaz was pretty fuckin’ incredible as far as shrimp go. And as pets go.

A long time ago, I was riding in a car with two friends when a bug hit our windshield. The bug made a really loud noise when he hit, and we talked about it for about 3 minutes. I then realized that we, much more complicated beings that we are, had spent an enormous amount of time by that bug’s standard, probably a significant amount of time (the equivalence of months of our life) talking about his short, sad existence and our part in it. So really, in some ways, that bug had quite the send off, much more, say, than the average bug gets.

If you got down to this part in my essay, you’ve now spent a minute or two reading about Spaz. Hundreds of people read this journal, and so all these wonderfully complicated beings, much more complicated than Spaz, and who he’ll never know, and wouldn’t comprehend if he did know, would spend the equivalence of months, just thinking about him and hearing what he was.

Were we all so lucky.

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