ASCII by Jason Scott

Among the people I was reaching out to for an interview for GET LAMP was Gregory Yob, the original creator of the game “Hunt the Wumpus”, which could be argued was one of the first adventure-like games on a computer. It was a long shot, but I take a lot of long shots and life has rewarded me for this.

Anyway, I just found out that in October of last year, the same time I was announcing this project, Gregory Yob (now named Gregory Coresun) died. It gets a little unusual after that, because it turns out that he had left a will to be cryogenically frozen, and this has happened, so he is now in a tank in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I suppose to some people that’s weird but I don’t think it’s weirder than being turned into dust and scattered somewhere you were fond of, or storing yourself in a box underneath the Earth with a big-ass stone marker informing passerby where your box is and when you got there.

Philosophy aside, it’s another missed opportunity. I hate this situation, because now Wumpus will be mentioned but I’ll never have Gregory Yob/Coresun’s opinion of it in his own words.

Filming began in earnest on GET LAMP, and I have now lined up 4 definite interviews since Saturday, which will be taking place across the next few months. I obviously intend there to be many dozens. If you think I should be interviewing you, please contact me, because I need all the help with that I can get.

Here’s hoping I don’t miss too many more.

2 Comments

I just wanted to drop a note about a company that’s been helping me a bit lately.

Textfiles.com has gone through a number of hosting situations over the years. The material’s all over the place, I get tens of thousands of visitors a day, and basically I’m just a huge pain in the ass compared to your garden-variety website that sells hats for cats. For a while, I ended up hosting it in my basement, but that of course killed the incoming line and I couldn’t do much else.

I started getting a really great mirror with a place called TQHOSTING, who took on some mirrors of the more popular sites I’m running. I have a machine hosted with them, and the price is solid, and the attitude great. While I never throw all my eggs into one basket, this particular basket is good for a lot of the eggs.

I’ve been with them for a good amount of time now and things have been great, and since they just ramped up for more business, I thought I’d mention them and send some people that way, since it might be easy to assume I have two settings of opinion with hosting: “Blows Goats” and “Neutral”. In fact, I also have “Great”. And I’ve found tqhosting to be great.

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Around 6am on Tuesday, the cache.cow.net machine started crashing. It crashed a half-dozen times this year, increasing in frequency, but this was the big one, and the box stopped successfully checking the filesystems properly. They simply couldn’t be fixed and the machine would no longer reboot.

This box does a lot, so I couldn’t just leave it down, so off I went to CompUSA, bought about $600 worth of future server, built it, and had it all back within a day. Mail works, websites work, but my galleries are down and will probably need a rebuild. On the other hand, this is a much faster machine and the disk space has tripled to over a terabyte.

This machine is an ant farm.

It’s existed in one form or another for about 11 years. It has been a bunch of stuff, starting from a Sun 3/280 to a Sun 3/60 to a few Linux and FreeBSD boxes. At one time it cost money to be able to use it for user accounts. Now you have to have either helped me with things or be related to me. Most people have drifted away to other places for their work since web space and bandwidth have become so cheap. But a few stay around.

There’s the website for my brother’s gardening business. (If you live in Dutchess County, NY, he’ll kick your landscape’s ass.) There’s my my longest and closest friend’s weblog about not writing. There’s an ultrafiltration company run by my ex-girlfriend’s parents. In fact, the ex-girlfriend has an account here too.

That’s not counting all the other websites on here: my Psygnosis tribute page, cd.textfiles.com, and a few sites that I absolutely refuse to explain.

Some people still send me a few dollars every year to keep things up. Others don’t pay at all. A lot of the free accounts were people who gave me assistance when I ran a short-lived ISP in 1995. I said “you get free accounts for helping me”. Talk about backing the right horse!

When the machine has gone down, they come out of the woodwork. The ant farm has it’s side opened, and you can see all the little lives and activities that are still occuring on this box, even after a decade and so many moves. Little businesses, weblogs, music libraries, photos and mail, passing by. The mails that come in, asking what’s up with the broken machine, range from meekly curious to humorously snide. Some are friends I would never call friends now. Some get phone calls from me every week. It really does range like that.

Naturally, I have archives going back to the beginning, snapshots of this machine as it travelled between hardware, gained users, lost sites, and so on. I’m keeping the history close to me nowadays; I’ve gotten a lot better at that.

All of these incarnations, all of these lives are on this little place that isn’t a place, this little collection of heated and spinning metal that I keep running, year after year, probably until I myself stop running. It’s interesting how that all has worked out.

So things are back to normal now, in fact, some bits are running better than they ever have thanks to the improved hardware and space, and the art farm’s sides are closed up again… until next time.

2 Comments

I spent a lot of money this week.

Don’t cry for me, of course. I don’t overextend myself when I spend money in droves and I don’t bet the farm on long shots. Even if the BBS documentary never made a dime, it would have set me back about the same amount as if I’d been building a kit car in my garage. That said, it was nice things have turned out as they did, since that enabled me the funds to start working on another one.

Anyway.

When I started work on GET LAMP, I had a number of ideas. I have learned something from projects I work on: if an idea scares me, it’s an idea worth investigating. Ideas that make you comfortably sit back and be pleased with yourself are probably firm, solid, predictable ideas, but it’s the ones that make you shiver and feel like the floor is shifting that have a great chance of amazing success. Some of the scary ideas I had in the past were putting the BBS documentary on 3 DVDs and making it 9 hours (it ended up being five and a half), and making such an overelaborate packaging. I like scary ideas.

I’ve had a number of scary ideas for this documentary, and one of them was to shoot in high definition.

In the beginning, I was going to go after HDV, the quasi-hi-definition format that has caused a little burst of improvement in video quality. You can get amazing shots out of HDV cameras. I was specifically looking at a little number made by Sony called the HDR-FX1. It’s about three grand and shoots a high definition format, and can store that format on DV Tapes. Money saved, money saved. It’s totally compatible with the video editing software I use (Vegas) and it had a bunch of example shots and footage that looked good. So even though going high definition was a scary choice, here was a firm, solid, predictable idea.

But then I heard about the Panasonic HVX-200.

I’d already seen what the DVX-100, the standard-definition ancestor to the HVX-200 could do, how it make things look. I really wanted that look, which is very cinematic and subtle, but wanted it in high definition. So the announcement of the HVX-200 was great. It was to be released on December, 2005. So, that would work out for my scheduling.

Unfortunately, the thing was retailing for $5,995. That’s a ton of cash.

As a result, I proposed the Adventurers’ Club, a way that people who liked the work I did on the BBS documentary could throw some money my way, and get a few bonus items when the movie came out: 3 copies of the final project, the first copies that were distributed, and their names in the credits. Oh, and of course a copy of the BBS documentary immediately, so they got something for the movie.

Doing this raised me $5000 in two months. Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet. I really appreciate all those folks stepping up and saying they believed in me.

So, in January, it became obvious that:

• The camera wasn’t really coming out in December. It was more like February.
• The camera was going to be in random places with random waiting lists.
• The camera was going to cost more than $5995 when you put in the other stuff it needed.

Now, in February, I had an incredible opportunity come up, to interview the author of Suspended and Infidel, Infocom Implementor, and 25-year game veteran Mike Berlyn. Mr. Berlyn was going to be leaving the US and travelling, with no set schedule to come back. He had sold his stuff and was going native elsewhere, and so if I wanted to interview him, it was now or never.

So I got the camera by hitting a half-dozen stores every day (it arrived about a week and a half before the shoot) and I went to a local great rental place called Rule Broadcast to rent all the rest of the equipment I would need for the shoot. I estimated that to get to the equipment I needed for the shoot would be another $3,600. I didn’t want to spend that extra money.

So I went down, did the shoot, got the footage. Some of it’s a little messed, but there’s tons to use for the film. It was, ultimately, a success. I got back from Florida and returned the equipment, and waited for the price on stuff to go down. I waited for further equipment to become available.

February became March became April. Now I was 6 months away from where I’d first annouced GET LAMP and only had about 4 hours of footage to show it. Not good. Not right.

So, this week, I bit the bullet. I bought the stuff I needed.

Here’s the secret about the Panasonic HVX-200 that Panasonic is not making clear. It is not a $6,000 camera. It is a $10,000 camera. You can’t use the camera properly without expensive “P2” cards, and it’s not a good idea to shoot without the “P2” store, a very helpful little bit of equipment that’s used to store the content of the P2 cards so that you can store the data away immediately while still shooting. There are external hard drives coming, but they are going to run into over a thousand dollars as well, more in the range of two.

So between everything you need, seriously, we’re talking about ten grand. I don’t mind this, but I would have preferred that Panasonic make this clear. They do not.

So, this week, I am buying the additional equipment I need:

• 4gb P2 Cards, which store 12 minutes of footage: $650 apiece, had to buy two.
• P2 Store, device for saving off data on P2 cards, $1500.
• Battery for P2, because I got it and surprise, no goddamned battery: $120

WHAP. $3000 down. One week. On top of the camera and other stuff I got.

Now, ideally, this camera will last me through a couple documentaries, so that’s one cost down in the future. Also, most of the main people I want to interview for GET LAMP are in New England, so travel costs are shrunk. And this should all be the lion’s share of the money I spend on it, outside of the eventual distribution.

But where the BBS Documentary was amortized over 4 years, this documentary is taking a massive money hit right in the beginning.

But you know, I look at some of the footage I shot, the stuff back in February, with this camera, this Scary Idea I pulled onto. And you know what?

I was right.

That is not a photo. That is a screenshot.

That is what GET LAMP will look like.

So that’s it. Filming begins in earnest next week.

7 Comments

I’ve finished uploading the second talk (actually the first, chronologically) that I gave at Notacon. It’s called “Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts” and I gave it on the Friday before my Wikipedia speech.

The archive.org page for downloading it is here.

Compared to the Wikipedia speech, this is pretty fluffy stuff, mostly traipsing around the subject and the history of podcasting, with a bunch of other trivia and subjects thrown in. Some people who’ve never heard my talking style before the Wikipedia speech who might download this one will be surprised at how much slower I talk in this one. Others, though, are probably happy I stopped talking as fast as I did in the Wikipedia speech.

The actual thing that interests me about this recording and speech, though, is how it was accomplished. You’re hearing a speech recorded using wireless mics I bought for the Text Adventure Documentary, which are feeding into a digital recorder I also bought for the documentary (and a few other projects). Let me go into audio nerd mode for a moment, since some people care about these details.

The wireless mic is connected to my lapel and runs down to a transmitter next to my left pocket (as I mention at the end of the speech, Notacon staff wired me on the right side with a different wireless setup to go to their cameras and mixing board, so I was one wired up bastard.)

The microphones I use are called Sennheiser EW-100-G2s. The digital recorder I have is called a Marantz PMM671. (I call it the wrong model number in the recording).

Hence, when I listen to this talk, I’m actually less interested in the content than how good it sounds. You can hear me very clearly, you can make out the audience just enough for you to be aware I have one, and the thing just does not distort. The PMM671 records everything to a SD card, and can hold about 3 hours of audio, which it stores in .WAV form. The recorder also has a USB port.

So, basically, I could finish my talk, walk over to my laptop, and have a 300mb .WAV file of my speech. Done. That’s fantastic.

What I used to do was put my camera up on the podium, aimed at my stomach, and then record that way. This was uneven at best. Sometimes it came out great, and sometimes I’d wander away from the podium and I’d be screwed. No such problem here! It came out just fantastic.

There were two other official appearances I made at Notacon. A game show called “Wait! Wait! Don’t Pwn Me”, hosted by Nick Farr of the Hacker Foundation, and a panel called “Hacker Media”. I will likely upload the panel, but not the gameshow. No reasonable person wants to watch this gameshow, trust me.

It feels good to be back in the swing of collecting and working. I’ve moved a lot of gigabytes this week, and intend to move a lot more. Expect digitize.textfiles.com to get a mass of new scans, too.

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“I see you’re working on digitizing stuff,” John told me in IRC. “Do you want some of my magazines? I was really hesitating about throwing them out, and you can have them instead. I’d prefer that.”

“Of course!” I said. “I’ll pay for shipping.”

“There’s a lot of them.”

“I’m fine with that.”

While I was away at Notacon, they arrived. They ALL arrived. All NINETY POUNDS OF THEM.

What John sent me was a massive treasure trove of 1989-1995 era gaming magazines: Electronic Gaming Monthly, Gamepro, Electronic Games, Video Games, Video Games and Computer Entertainment, Nintendo Power and tons of one-offs. This represents hundreds of magazines. The photo you see is just what fit in the camera shot. There’s a lot more.

Some are worn to faded softness from years of being read and re-read. Others are like I stepped through a door in 1992 and then came back in clutching my newest issue of Gamepro.

As time goes on in the life of a collector (or archivist, as I sometimes call myself), these sort of things happen more and more. Additions come in the form of boxes or van-loads, not single pieces. I still get plenty of single pieces and want them, but I took in 50+ CD-ROMs recently that went on cd.textfiles.com and of course I am always being sent ZIP archives of people’s old hard drives. This is what happens, and I’m quite happy with it.

You can be quite assured that I will be digitizing lots of ads for digitize.textfiles.com in the coming months. Currently, however, I am going through these issues looking for stuff relative to both GET LAMP and the Psygnosis Tribute Site that I run.

I see many fine memories and surprises ahead.

Isn’t life wonderful.

4 Comments

I did a lot of stuff at Notacon 3. I helped get a radio station up and running. I was in a game show. I moderated a panel on Hacker Media. And I did two presentations, one on a history of Podcasts and one called The Great Failure of Wikipedia, a sequel/elaboration on the weblog entry I put on here, so very long ago.

Today, I uploaded The Great Failure of Wikipedia to The Internet Archive. You can find a link to the presentation here: The Great Failure of Wikipedia (April 8, 2006). It’s in a bunch of formats, from WAV to OGG to FLAC to multiple forms of MP3. It can be downloaded and it can be streamed.

I’m very happy with this speech. Like others, it was done off a prepared-on-paper-then-memorized outline, with parts added and deleted as I went, depending on crowd reaction and final consideration. I hit all the major points I wanted to; if people agree or disagree, they’re doing so based on what I said, not what I forgot to say or didn’t mean to say.

People get a little emotional about Wikipedia and some attacks may come as a result of this, but oh well. I’m over it. I consider this one of the better presentations I’ve done out of the dozen or so I’ve given at conventions. And I don’t give the same speech twice, so this is it. I can live with it, especially considering how well this one came out.

A lot of people thought I was going to attack Wikipedia as being “wrong” and something that should be “stopped”, which is a useless argument/approach to take, especially if you’re into freedom of expression. My main thesis is that Wikipedia’s initial design and architecture, which is now changing constantly, failed to take the reality of humanity and the way people interact with information into account, and in doing so, has wasted a nearly-incalculable amount of energy and has betrayed, to some extent, it’s promises, credo and goals. You know, minor stuff.

Anyway, check out the speech and enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed presenting it.

Update: Someone was kind enough to transcribe it for me.
Another Update: And then “Judgmentalist” took it and made it a PDF. Thank you!

9 Comments

Internet Archive notifies me when someone posts a review of something I uploaded to the archive. You get told someone reviewed it and a link to the entry. Someone decided to review one of the raw interviews I uploaded, an ANSI artist named Tracer, at the end of the BBS Documentary run (I believe he’s basically the last one I did).

The entry and review is at http://www.archive.org/details/20040308-bbs-tracer but I’ll just post it down here. It’s from someone named “Pole”:

Reviewer: Pole – 1 out of 5 stars – April 4, 2006
Subject: Improvements

I have now wathced a couple of the bbs interviews, but i’m becomming increasingly frustrated… although the topic matter interrests me i cant help but get really annoyed.
some tips:

1.Prepare questions,

2.Show examples of the art or whatever is talked about.

3. Edit the interview! not everything the guy says is interesting, and what the interviewer is saying is just horrible

4. Dont call Errol Morris a “nut”… he is after all one of the greatest docu directors on the planet… i’m surprised that the interviewer had actually read anything about Morris but then dismissing him as a “nut” thats just ignorant…

5.Find people that you actually want to listen to speak…

1 Star for the topic matter.

sorry for the outburst but i got really frustrated by this one, especially because i thought the topic was interesting..

I posted a response, but no idea if it’ll show up properly or what the deal is with reviews on Internet Archive. On this weblog, at least, I can stretch out a response, and I think this situation brings up some important points of discussion.

I knew I was taking a slight risk uploading the full interviews of people onto archive.org. The most obvious is that some people would misunderstand the point of doing this, what I was aiming for, and so on. And then to go through and just start ripping on me, well…. like I said, bummer. Not “and I refuse to upload any more” bummer, but just a big “aw, man” while I’m trying to get work done.

Each of the interviews I did (over 200) were conducted under wildly different circumstances, different reasons, and different motivations. In the beginning, of course, I didn’t know what sort of documentary I was going to end up with, so people are asked all sorts of wild questions and all sorts of subjects way outside of their “specialty”, simply because I didn’t know how much footage I’d have at the end. By the end, I have basically all the footage I need, and we’re down to me experimenting with the subject to discuss various already-established themes in the documentary to see what they could add to it.

In the case of Tracer (the interview in question), there are several factors that are perhaps not so obvious, or even possibly obvious.

• He was not all for doing this interview; he was basically asked to by RaD Man.
• He hadn’t been involved in ANSI for basically a decade, and had done a lot of other stuff since then with both running businesses and a full professional life.
• He honestly didn’t remember a lot.
• He had things he needed to do later in the day.

All of these factors add up to a bunch of motivations and situations that I, as someone who was a hardened veteran of many interview setups, had to deal with. And here’s what was involved in that.

Some interviewees who wanted to be in this documentary (or my more recent project) have a “story” they want me to get or capture. Maybe it was how they met their wife, or how they had a great success, or how important the subject was to their life, and so on. Sometimes, they know there’s a classic “perception” of the subject that they want to dispel. In other words, they wish to be interviewed because they want to give a speech.

Others have been contacted by me or arranged to be contacted by me. I am saying “I have something that I want to talk about with you on camera, and I would appreciate some of your time talking about it. I’ll stop by.” This is, obviously, an entirely different situation for them.

If the person is ‘famous’ or a figure of some known import, the dynamic is changed; they have nothing to prove, they know they’re “known” for the subject, and they’ve probably been interviewed about it a number of different ways and have distinct opinions or pre-set micro-speeches.

If the person is not famous and not known for a subject (many of the people who I interviewed, this was their first and only video interview for anything), and I’ve contacted them to be interviewed, then we have an unusual situation indeed. Tracer was one of those, and there were probably 10 or more of those.

Turned around this way, my style in this interview maybe makes a little more sense. I ask questions of the person, questions they’ve never had asked of them, and I listen to the answer. I do not have pre-set questions that I click down on, bang bang bang. I instead have a conversation with them on camera, knowing I can clip things down. I had a number of anecdotes/stories that I had at the ready to talk about, and I would tell them, waiting for the person to go “hey, that reminds me!” Some of the best stories you hear in the documentary are from the person going “hey, that reminds me!” and just blowing me away.

But I could see where the unedited interview is boring as dirt to some. Because it is. It’s the rough sketch, the subtle dance, the blocking of movements trying to see where things go. Maybe the story in Tracer wasn’t ANSI, it was about being online. Maybe it was about knowing himself a little better because he could express his skills in ANSI art. Too many times in this world we think of a person as a “thing” and don’t realize they have a life and story outside of the “thing”.

If it sounds weird and artistic… it kind of is. I’m thinking of giving a talk on this at a conference at some point.

But back to the misunderstanding.

It’s heartbreaking to think someone is pulling these down and expecting them to be completed productions, with editing, subtitles, clips, and all the little slow parts removed. That so wasn’t the intention.

The intention was to make available, in basically full form, an interview with someone. Warts and all. Their warts (except where they slandered or otherwise exposed themselves legally without knowing it) and my warts, including my long questions, or my changing the subject matter, or otherwise being who I am.

Imagine watching the filming of a situation comedy, a production that normally runs an hour, but also including the script reading session, the rehearsals, the pre-taping discussions, the bloopers, and the full final shots. That’d be a lot of footage. A lot of it would be boring. Some of it would be pointless. You’d watch some and go “aaa, you’re doing it wrong” and then later they’d fix it but you had to sit through all those mistakes.

If you were watching that footage expecting to see a situation comedy, then you are going to be miserable. You are not getting what you expected and even if the footage is useful in a hundred ways (here’s how a joke changes, how actors prepare a scene, how a production company sets up shots, how a show is made), it was useless for the way you wanted it.

So it breaks my heart to see these sorts of reviews. I spent 8 months turning the 250 hours into 5 and a half. And they think I didn’t spend any.

And I knew there was a risk showing my mistakes or my long monologues or the interviewee forgetting things or mis-stating facts or all the other little irritations and inevitable human aspects of these tapes. I knew the risk was, in a world where everything is pre-baked for you and you just have to press the button and set for three minutes, that I was going to make someone think I couldn’t be bothered enough to “fix” the stuff.

But that wasn’t the point at all.

When I took an interview of someone that went on for two hours and used 2 minutes of it, I cut out a ton of stuff. Sometimes it was cheddar, of course: us discussing where to put the lights, the person asking me for prompting of remembering an obscure software product, me telling them what I intended to do with the documentary. But other times it was sublime, a person would tell a two minute story (which therefore became not usable for the films) that was intense, informative, endearing and real. And in a regular production, you’d never hear it.

A lot of times, we’d touch on subjects outside the area of bulletin board systems entirely; how some companies were engaged in questionable business practices, specific area of politics and conflict that arose from owning a computer that work paid for, taxes, what movies were playing that week… you know stuff. The inevitable result of doing this across 4 years. There is a lot of anthropological information buried in there, stuff that has a meaning greater than the BBS Documentary itself.

And sometimes, there’s historical information that I had no use for, but which I’m sure someone else might. They could take the footage which I licensed Creative Commons and re-use it for their own purposes. When I was in film school and taking classes in audio production, we were given audio tape (this was some time ago) of an announcer doing the schedule of a night of television shows for a local station. He said things wrong, he asked questions, he mis-stated things, he coughed… and we were given a razor blade (this was some time ago) and we had to re-cut his takes into 30 second, 60 second and 2 minute versions. It was a great lesson. And we did it using someone else’s raw footage.

Same with my stuff. I could imagine a teacher downloading the MPEG of an interview of someone from the collection on Internet Archive and saying “So, take this 1 hour interview and make it into a 2 minute feature like you might see on a news show.” Since the stuff is all out there and licensed so students can do it, they can use it for resumes or portfolios and feel no limitations about this. It’s my way of giving back to that group, since it helped form me.

Similarly, I didn’t cut out my questions because I wanted people to know what the interviewee was responding to. If I said “what is your fondest memory of a BBS” and they talked about someone they met, you would have trouble knowing what the context was, if you didn’t hear my question first. My sometimes poorly-worded, spur-of-the-moment, improvised question.

With a speech deficiency.

Anyway, just wanted to mention this. Be assured, the interviews will continue to come as I can get time to upload them. I’ll let you know when the next batch is up.

Oh, and yes, Errol Morris is most definitely a nut.

3 Comments

I’ve been asked, in various ways, where I get the energy or motivation to enmesh myself in so many projects. Or to actually finish them. I know why, but the answer is not exactly intuitive.

When I was 25, I woke up and couldn’t move my legs. I wasn’t paralyzed, but any slight movement, in any direction, caused intense, horrible pain. I at first thought they were broken, but that didn’t make any sense and I had done absolutely nothing weird or out of character in the days before. But I literally couldn’t move without pain. I crawled off my bed (technically, I slowly fell off it) and dragged myself using just my arms to a phone, and got a lift to the hospital. I can still remember getting down the flights of stairs to the landing. It was scary because there was just no rhyme or reason to the pain, just endless shocks if I moved them, like a cramp that wouldn’t stop and involved my entire legs.

The doctor in the emergency room looked me over, had me x-rayed to look for breaks, and ultimately gave me some painkillers. I got crutches and a prescription for more painkillers.

He said “you know, it’s almost like you have gout. But you’re 25, that makes no sense.”

This event turned out to be a warm-up, a tuning of the orchestra for later in the year.

While riding in the car with my girlfriend, Dory, we were having an argument. I only remember the argument at all because I also remembered getting a small shooting pain in my gut, not unlike rolling onto a thumbtack slowly. I ignored it and we kept arguing.

At some point, I noticed I was sweating. Profusely. And the thumbtack or whatever it was was growing, becoming more involved, and taking more of my attention. I brought this up with Dory, and we turned around from where we were going and drove back to her home.

By the time we got there, I was now in marked pain. I could feel shooting stabs all along my side, and with great effort we got me onto the couch, where I sat there, unable to move, unable to really think, except to just feel like my insides had ripped apart and I was bleeding internally.

Which, of course, I was.

The first time something bad happens to you like this, where your body utterly betrays you, and you not only can’t do anything about it, you don’t even know what it is, that’s about as scared and pained as you get. If someone shoots you in the leg, you know that they shot you and why your leg hurts. But what if your leg starts to feel like someone shot it all by itself?

I lay there on Dory’s couch, beside myself with pain, unable to move, roll, stretch, or tense in a way that affected any of the pain whatsoever, and I knew pretty much what Hell on Earth was all about.

Later, it was determined what happened; I have kidney stones, brought about by a low pH in my blood, which causes crystals to form in my kidneys and extremities. After a while, these formed crystals are like little razor blades that get stuck in my joints (mostly legs) and in my kidneys, where they eventually pass through my system and rip me inside.

When this occurs, I am in searing, unbelievable pain. It reads like the last third of a Dick Francis novel. I won’t attempt to emulate his style here. Even though I know what is going on, it is pain of such intensity I forget its moments and just classify them all into one big, black file in my mind.

When I feel that small tug in my gut, I go “ah, yes”, and it happens again.

I’ve never had alcohol. I’ve never had recreational drugs. (I don’t refuse medical attention and have been given painkillers.) I don’t smoke, and I don’t generally live a life that puts me in mortal danger on a regular basis.

All that said, I still found out, the hard way, that nothing is guaranteed. Nothing says that your day in the sun today won’t be followed by a night in a bloody wreck by midnight.

With this awareness of the roughly 20 or so attacks I’ve had in the last 10 years, it has been trivial to decide whether to start a project now, whether to begin writing something now, whether to barrel forward and immediately gather as much of what I need for an effort, demarcate my time, stay awake that extra three hours to put something to rest.

And there’s where I get my motivation.

6 Comments

This has appeared on the Whitedust Security Website:
http://www.whitedust.net/article/52/Interview:_Jason_Scott/

Interview with Jason Scott
By Mark Hinge & Peter Prickett (Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:48:17 +0000)

Jason Scott is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. He is also the creator of a documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary which began shipping May, 2005.

WD> What first got you into computing?

Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool IBMer – basically joined the company soon after grad school and stayed on for 30 years, including a few years afterward as a consultant. He was always able to bring home strange machinery from work as long as I could remember (by the time I was born in 1970, my father had been at IBM for about 5 years) and so when he started bringing home different types of computers like the Commodore PET, I was the one of his three kids who immediately took to them. And when the IBM PC came out, we got one of the first ones. The bond was instantaneous and magical for me and computers and has never left.

WD> What was the computer that got you started getting serious on?

I was pretty serious on that Commodore PET, with the chiclet keyboard and the massive 8k of memory, combined with the awesome influx from the cassette drive. I still have it, of course, and it’s about 30 feet from me as I type this. So that’s about 25 years I’ve had it.

WD> What was your first modem?

My first modem was actually not mine – my friend Chris Boufford’s grandparents had a modem at their place and Chris showed me how it all worked; it was a Racal-vadic 300 baud acoustic, which meant putting the phone handset in a cradle and not talking too loud, lest the data corrupt. Those were great times.

WD> You co started TinyTIM in 1990. It is reported that TinyTIM is the oldest MUSH still running. Why did you start it? Why did you resign in 2000 and from what position?

TinyTIM was a MUD, later a MUSH. People can look up what that means, but if you haven’t heard of it, think ‘online adventure game/chat system’. I started TinyTIM with my friend John as a practical joke/parody of other such games that were running at the time. There was a kind of overbearing seriousness to online games, with a strong roleplaying aspect as a strict adherence to ‘the rules’, no matter how lightly those rules had been constructed in the first place. We started our own game to make fun of those games, and a strong community (an actual strong, real community) was quickly formed around it, and has lasted in some form to the present day, online and off. As for my leaving, I’d co-founded TinyTIM when I was 19, and when I was around 29, I had started TEXTFILES.COM. TEXTFILES.COM took off, and while I loved using the TinyTIM game, I was pouring a lot of energy into it for what at that point was a strong set of members numbering in the dozens (with hundreds of other occasional visitors). With textfiles.com, I quickly started to serve out hundreds of thousands of users in a month. If I wrote an essay, I got hundreds of responses or forms of acknowledgements. With TinyTIM, I got one or two. After a while, I realized it wasn’t as much fun or rewarding. So, after much personal thrashing, I walked away. The breakup was not amicable. But the game continues to exist, although not anything like it was.

WD> How long did you work for Psygnosis? Your role at Psygnosis has been described as technical support. I suspect that what we understand to be technical support in 2006 is different to 1995. Please explain your role?

I worked at Psygnosis for about a year before Sony (the parent company at that point) moved operations to the west coast, away from Cambridge, MA where I worked, and so the company closed. I then worked for a small start-up in the same office with some ex-employees, but it didn’t take off. It’s hard for me to imagine how different things are between then and now, because I’m sure the drive to help was there; you either want to help these poor people calling or you quit (or get promoted away). I loved helping people. I loved the sound of relief when I started to tell them how to get around a tough puzzle, or to get their machines to boot, or how to get into the system to figure out why the game wasn’t working as well as it could. The Psygnosis US office was small enough that we didn’t go crazy over metrics (amount of time per call) and while we were sometimes inefficient about that, we made a lot of people happy. I was in it, of course, because I loved the idea of working with Psygnosis; truly a peak in my lifetime.

WD> You have spoken at every DEF CON since 1999 and numerous other conferences. When was your last speech? And what was the subject matter?

My last speech as of this writing was ‘A History of Hacker Conferences’ at Shmoocon 2006 in January. I expect by the time this shows up, my big talk will be ‘The Great Failure of Wikipedia’, being given in the beginning of April at Notacon, in Cleveland. I encourage people to check the site for that con out at www.notacon.org. Good people. Good times.

WD> You made a documentary – BBS: The Documentary. It took you four years to complete and it was premiered at the 7th Vintage Computer Festival. Why there?

The Vintage Computer Festival rules; an absolutely great time. At some point, I think Sellam (the organizer of it) floated me trying out some footage there, and I said I would happily premiere a ‘beta’ version of it. So I did that, and the feedback from the crowd changed a lot of how the thing ended up being at the end. So it was a perfect match, passionate geek folks seeing a geek movie.

WD> As I mentioned earlier, it took four years to make. Why so long? And why were you so willing to give so much time to the project?

Two main reasons: I have a day job which limits the amount of time I can spend on my travelling and other hobbies, and the pure mass of interviews (over 200) just took a long time to accomplish. And I was going to do 400! As for why, I realized that if this wasn’t done, then people who had a vital influence on BBSes and therefore the Internet were not going to get their time in the sun. By getting this stuff on video, I knew I’d be able to do something to ‘save’ the history of that time beyond just some lines in the back of a telecom book.

WD> Why are BBS’s important? Are they still in use?

BBSes are just an electronic extension of communities, of people communicating, and of the human need to gather and trade their knowledge and stories of their lives. It’s a basic need, and the bulletin board systems fulfilled that need. While some of the aspects have changed (people generally use internet connections instead of dial-up telephone lines, and HTML rules the day on web forums), the basic paradigms of electronic messaging are still there, still running, still making a difference in people’s lives.

WD> Did you run your own BBS?

I ran a BBS for two years called The Works, in 914/New York State, Westchester County. Like a lot of young kids, it went down when I went to college.

WD> What sort of market do you think a documentary with such a specialised subject will find? How have sales fared?

Sales have fared well; I made back production costs within three weeks of release, and the rough numbers go into six figures. I think there’s a great market for a well-told story about anything, really. I don’t pretend this movie is for everyone, but people who have seen it who weren’t forced to see it by others, give me very strong positive feedback. For its ‘market’/audience, it is just what folks are looking for. It’s what I was looking for in 2001, before discovering there wasn’t anything like it. It’s not for everyone, but because of that, I could make it so tha
t it would do what it does, very well.

WD> Can you give some examples of the things that the documentary brought to light without ruining it for those who haven’t seen it?

Oh, there’s a lot. If people remember or know of BBSes, then it touches on subjects that haven’t seen a lot of documentary/movie footage about them: XMODEM. 300/1200 baud. Ward Christensen. Fidonet. Boardwatch. Phone Phreak BBSes and ‘Boxes’. Cracking/Pirating Apple II software. ANSI Art and the ANSI Art scene. Just everything around BBSes that I could fit. It’s 8 episodes long, totals five and a half hours between them, and has tons of bonuses. It’s a lot of stuff.

WD> You have written a lengthy essay about BBS Documentary being a Creative Commons. Could you briefly explain why and what do you consider the future of Creative Commons and copy write law?

The essay is a huge one to distill down but I can try. Basically, I am a big fan of being consistent where possible, and it’s kind of hypocritical to tell other people that they should share their works and then not do it with your own. And having made an actual ‘thing’, these hours of episodes, I was big into the idea that when the time came to release them, I would not place the same amount of restrictions on them that copyright law in the US allows. As a copyright holder in the US, you are given an enormous amount of tools and privileges to defend your work, literally for decades beyond your own death. I think, personally, that essentially to protect Mickey Mouse for the Disney corporation, the copyright law has been rendered meaningless, and too easily ignored in the same way that you ignore the babblings of a crazy person. To have that opinion, however, you have to be willing to back it up with your own stuff. So I did. Creative Commons is an interesting solution to the copyright situation; offer, openly, alternate copyright contracts with the world that limit the creator’s hold over the works. For a creator, it makes them kind of nuts, but all charity is a little nuts. In my case, I knew it was silly to tell people not to copy my stuff. It was by geeks for geeks and geeks love to share cool stuff. So I got shared, a lot. I estimate it’s been downloaded by well into the tens of thousands. That’s really cool. I get fanmail. I can’t speculate how copyright will continue in this country, but I can go to bed at night knowing I did the right thing with my own stuff.

WD> Many people feel Wikipedia to be a wonderful thing. However you have had some issues with it. Why?

I direct people to my essay, ‘The Great Failure of Wikipedia’, or my talk on Wikipedia I’ll be giving at Notacon, which will be available on archive.org and other locations. It’ll say it better than any paragraph or two I throw out here. But I will say this: It IS a wonderful thing. But sometimes even wonderful things can have a dark side or cause as much trouble as they help.

WD> Is there anything in existence that you feel compares favourably to BBS?

Strange way to phrase it. I really like the way things are now, with near-instantaneous downloads of what used to take days. I like some web forums, some chatrooms, I really do like a lot of everything out there. The key is not to act like it’s supposed to replace or be the same as BBSes. It’s another thing, another situation, which comes down to the same: meeting and interacting with people. And I love doing that.

WD> You are the man responsible for textfiles.com. How long have you been doing this? What does textfiles.com do?

I started textfiles.com in 1998. I did it because I had a nice collection of old BBS-era textfiles, and I wanted them ‘saved’ by putting it on the Internet, since a lot of them missed out the chance to be transferred to websites. I think that little mission has been very successful; millions have been to textfiles.com since then. Since 1998, textfiles.com has had a lot of success, and also the mission has grown to kind of all sorts of computer history. So as time goes on, I just keep expanding, keep looking, keep adding. I currently consider it the best thing I’ve done.

WD> You’ve been involved in the ‘scene’ for twenty years. What do you consider the key moments?

My key moments are going to be different than others. People can look up the history for themselves, but my key BBSes that affected my early online life were: Sherwood Forest II. Sherwood Forest III. Osuny. The Safehouse. Dark Side of the Moon. Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Works. The Emerson Wall. ARGUS. People know them or they don’t. They’re like family history.

WD> Your next project is Get Lamp. What is it about? What do you expect to discover?

GET LAMP is about Text Adventures. Think Adventure, Zork, Scott Adams, Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, Inform, and so on. Kind of strange, I know, but it’s going to be really enjoyable interviewing people. I think the kind of personality who can write a story/world where they have to anticipate every possible thing a reader would want to know about is a fascinating personality type. I expect to meet a lot of that sort of personality.

WD> When do you anticipate its completion?

I won’t even try. The BBS movie was supposed to be two years. Look what happened. I just encourage people to check getlamp.com and ask to be notified.

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