ASCII by Jason Scott

So Redwolf’s watermarking mania cranked me off on the 10th of March. From the 10th to the 11th of March, I finally sat down and scripted a bunch of back-end process to finish a previously dormant project, digitize.textfiles.com. This is a “money where my mouth is” website that would have digitized material, without watermarks, as well as the full TIFFs available for archivists and maniacs.

I finished this project on the evening of March 11th and mentioned it on my weblog.

On the 12th, waxy.org mentioned it. Then the MAKE zine Blog mentioned it. Then a bunch of other weblogs picked it up. digg got it.

Then CNET called. Then we started to get a little pounded.

By the time OSNEWS arrived with their own gang of hit bats, over 12,000 people had seen the website. TWELVE THOUSAND.

It’s not really slowing down yet. It’s happening again and again; someone goes “Wow, neat shit”, and then passes it along to enough people that someone who has a prominent position somewhere lets their audience know about it and it bounces out into the world’s face again.

The reason why, of course, is that this is, in its own way, interesting stuff. Either the images are eye catching, as advertising was meant to be, or they show a historical situation, like price or design. Maybe people spy a name of a company long gone or unlike how it was back then. Or they remember something from their own childhood, an image or phrase that makes them feel young again.

That’s the great thing about museums. They range the gamut of reactions and emotions, just by people witnessing the exhibits.

Ironically, I’ve had a number of people contact me about sending me stuff as a result of seeing the digitize.textfiles.com site. And then, in some cases, they ask if it’s OK if they can watermark what they send in! I link them to the appropriate weblog entry and say no, no it’s not OK. A few have decided to strip their watermarks and send me the originals. A few are up in the air. But I’m holding firm on this, so no need to waste either of our time if you buy into vandalism.

In its short 9 days of existence, the DIGITIZE site has added over 215 pages of scanned material. I have a lot left to go. I’ve purchased a better flatbed scanner that arrives tomorrow. I am on the beat.

But what about my documentary? Well, that’s where things dovetail nicely, because I had on my plate the project of scanning in dozens and dozens of text-adventure related material for the use in the documentary. Guess where it’s all going!

And how do you keep track of this stuff flying in? Well, that explains last night’s project. I spent a little while coding in Bourne shell, and I am happy to announce that the DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM website now has an ATOM feed to tell you when I’ve added new material! This is the first main textfiles.com site (outside this weblog) to have such a feed, and likely more will have them over time, but until then, get your newsreader, subscribe to the feed, and you’ll know when the latest ads, brochures and manuals join the pack! I promise it’ll be something you’ll enjoy.

As for the stuff itself, I suppose I could fill ASCII.TEXTFILES.COM with endless yammering each few days about what I’ve added, but I think that my energy can be better spent elsewhere. When I add a new piece, it’ll contain a few lines from me about why it got scanned or what I think about it, and I believe we’ll leave it at that unless there’s another factoid or relevant essay I want people to know about.

A lot of these have very special personal meaning for me, hence my keeping them nearby for over 20 years. (Some of them I’ve kept for 25.) So while there’s historical meaning in a grand sense, a bit of these are like baby pictures; I remember being 11 and knowing that I was going to get one of these things, whatever it was, or that when I was older I would learn how it was done and make my own. Many of them were programs or products that I hoped I would be there, at those places, being a part of this wonderful colorful world.

And you know what? In a way I am.

Just to switch gears slightly, I wanted to just mention how that whole collecting all of the podcasts project was going.

It’s going very well.

I have thousands of different podcasts. I have many tens of thousands of individual episodes. I have hundreds of gigabytes of shows, sermons, mixtapes, chats, you name it. It is a spectacular success.

It’s all very scripted and I stress that I put as much energy into this thing on a daily basis as, say, one would putting on their socks in the morning. It’s really that far in the background.

Recently, however, I had to start figuring out someplace to store them as I was filling hard drives quicky.

If you want all of the kind of finger-in-the-air pontificating that geeks are truly capable of, far beyond which operating system is best and which computer language will keep you in Cheetos for the rest of your life, just start discussing storage, especially long-term storage.

For my own part, for this project and the amount of money I am willing to throw down on it, I am currently using DVD+R discs.

I have finished a bunch of interrelated scripts that move 4.5gb chunks of podcast into a place for me to burn into two copies, which I store in different binders, and which have unique IDs on them. The MP3s or other files on the podcast directories are then replaced with a short paragraph of text, saying, basically, “this was burned to Disc ID whatever, the MP3 file that was here was this long (minutes and seconds), this big (bytes) and here was anything like ID3 tags.” In this way, I can be sure of keeping track of what was downloaded, while freeing up 2-10mb space with a 500 byte pointer file. Which I also back up.

At some point, I’ll likely switch to other medium, like maybe just buying $50 hard drives and storing copies off to two of them and then storing those hard drives. Freaky, but it might be good.

Long-term? Do I think this medium is “archival quality”? Am I sure it’ll be there in 100, 50, 10, 1 year?

NO.

But at least I’m trying.

That’s all I can do.

I’ll happily make copies of what I’m doing for any entity that wants this, as long as they cover medium costs, and maybe time if that ends up being significant. Libraries, universities, people…. you know where to find me!

And so it goes. The scanination, the burnination, the infiltration. I’m having a wonderful time. Archiving is my passion. And there’s so much cool stuff out there.

If I had a family crest, it would probably say at the bottom, in big letters:

“I WILL HOLD IT.”

10 Comments

The glory of online life is how easy it is to have two parties, who from any distance would appear to be the same person or type of person, learn how much they really don’t get along. Such was how my Friday was spent. But hold tight through our little online battle, because you benefit from it.

I often post little jibes or comments across weblogs throughout the world, either saying something trifling or dumb or maybe attempting to make a point. As mentioned in the previous ASCII entry, I don’t like watermarking. I especially don’t like watermarking when the party watermarking doesn’t actually have any ownership rights over the watermarked item, whether it be scans or films or any online properly. I find it both harmful to the original item (which is now vandalized) and rather base of the people doing it, since they’re basically using someone else’s work to further their own (financial, material, social) ends.

Sometimes this merely bothers me, and sometimes it really irritates me. Such it was when a relatively new weblog, VintageComputing.com, run by 24 year old “RedWolf”, started posting some enjoyable scans of various ads and magazines up… but smarred with watermarks. Big honking watermarks. This weblog only started late last year, so I figured I’d have a chance to, you know, nudge things into proper perspective. As it turns out, into proper perspective isn’t where things went.

The entry I posted a comment on was this one. You won’t see my comments there because they were ultimately deleted. You also won’t see the back-channel e-mail that resulted, until now.

So, at the risk of making myself seem over the top on a minor issue (which I personally don’t consider minor), I present to you the online debate of Jason Scott and Redwolf over the issue of watermarking. All postings are real, all rescued from my own save-offs of the conversations. (I really do archive most everything.)

We begin with my simple post on the aforementioned weblog entry:

Jason Scott Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 6:45 am
Please stop watermarking your scans.

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Jason, thanks for asking (albeit a bit tersely).
Perhaps someday I will release all my scans in a watermark-free archive for you to download and save forever (then eventually make a site about based on my scanning work), as I know you must be itching to do. Until then, just enjoy them for the moment as temporary entertainment — or better yet, scan them yourself and you can have them in any format you want. I’m all for the preservation of history (in fact, compulsively so), but without some exclusiveness to our ad scans, they would be worthless to us to provide as entertainment. People would instantly copy them and pubish them everywhere else without giving us any credit for doing the research and work in documenting them. I know you probably have good intentions, but I can’t say the same for everyone else out there.

Jason Scott Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Your thinking is short-sighted, ineffective, and belies your youth.

To wit:

You provide no exclusiveness to your ad scans; the watermark you use is particularly ineffective against a driven entity, since it’s merely an overlay of a font logo over the graphics. It’s quite undoable.

But beyond the ease with which it can be removed, that still a step that most won’t wish to deal with, so likely it would remain. In fact, this is where your first point is wrong; smarring the images with your logo will not prevent distribution; you lack the legal capacity to mount lawsuits against other sites that would be putting up your jpegs. So they will continue to be distributed, en masse, as time goes on. All you do is make what might be the only scans of these images of a poorer quality.

You are a person with a scanner; this hardly entitles you to placing a “signature” on the items; you are in fact on the edge of copyright infringement by scanning in copyrighted works from magazines. Why go further and place some sort of “ownership” mark on something that isn’t yours?

What dark contigency do you think you’re protecting against by vandalizing the scans? Are you concerned of lost ad-clicks, of lost pop-up revenue? Are you worried that it will be thought that some other entity had the ability to use a scanner, stunting your future career path?

Reconsider your position. It’s flawed and needless, considering your obvious love of the subject at hand.

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Our use of scans of advertisements is within our fair use rights under US copyright law. I believe it is also our right to “vandalize” them with our watermarks. The claim has never been made of ownership of the scanned materials or that we alone have the right to control the distribution of the scanned ads. They are merely presented for consumption with a logo bearing the mark of the publisher. You can distribute them all you want, but they will still have our watermark on it. Feel free to remove them if you wish to take the time. Our content is designed to be enjoyed on our sites, no where else. Therefore if the presentation of the scanned materials looks flawed elsewhere, that is fine by me.

If my work with a scanner were useless and of no value, then neither I nor the editor of GSW would waste our time publishing my work. The time and effort I put into researching, compiling, scanning, and commenting on the materials I scan is worth something. In fact, my articles incorporate the scans into a new piece of art (my column), and that is also well within my fair use rights. You likely look at the scans as something you just want to download and preserve out of the original context in which they were presented (again, my column, which constitutes a “new work”), while I look at the scans in the context of the comments around them, as a monolithic piece of entertainment writing that should not be broken up. If I were mindlessly scanning ads and shoveling them in your face without the added value of commentary or filtering, then yes, I would just be a “man with a scanner.” But it looks to me that you are just a man with a “download button” who has no appreciation for the entertainment I am attempting to provide.

If my mission were to document and historically archive for all time the ads I was scanning and provide them as a historical service to the community, then yes, my position on watermarks would be flawed and needless. However, we in the US who want to make something of our lives have that “dark contingency” to deal with…called capitalism, that drives men to make everything you consume as entertainment, including the movies, music, games, computers, and BBS software you love as well (don’t even get me started on the medical technology that has likely saved your life many times over). Take out that “dark contingency” and you’re living in the Soviet Union circa 1970. I for one like it here in the US. If you don’t like it, move to Cuba or just shut up.

Jason Scott Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
There is no need to wave the little red flag at everyone who disagrees with you. Taking a two-tone approach to the world (you agree with my opinion or you are a communist/anti-capitalist) doesn’t win you any arguments, and belies, once again, your youth.

Part of that youth appears to be an unawareness of copyright law and of the use of specific terms; for example, calling yourself a “publisher” in this context is a bit of a stretch. You are not a publisher, having not created the work, gotten license to publish the work, or, it is assumed, paying the original creators of the work for any monetary recompense you are gaining by distributing the work. Similarly, your tossing around the term “fair use” is flawed, considering you’re using the works for (self-admittedly) financial gain and not for any academic, parody or journalistic purpose.

You are throwing around “entertainment” as a shield that would protect you from being considered an infringer of works, and that’s a weak shield indeed.

Leaving aside your fat-fingered grasp of the legal and economic situations you are in and portend to, I am surprised to hear of your dismissal of both historical and archival efforts, considering you have “branded” yourself as someone who appreciates “vintage” computers and history.

Are you saying that your entire motivation for this ongoing project is financial? Were your initial weblog posts merely filled with keywords intending to drive hits to your site? I don’t mind someone being out front with their motivations, and will file you along with the spam weblogs that collect every ad-click-relevant term they can under one leaky roof, but you seemed to have a different motivation, and I’m sure Simon thought similarly. It seems a shame that we would be both wrong.

Bear in mind, sir; I am your audience. And I am disappointed.

At this point, we switched to e-mail:

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:41:16 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads argument

Jason,

I apologize for disappointing you. I do love what I do (the blog) and do
it because I love it, not because of money (I won’t make any money on it in
a very very long time). However, I do wish to eventually make money doing
what I do, like everyone else. That doesn’t make me evil, and of course,
you wanting to be a historian doesn’t make you evil (or communist) either.
My comments on Cuba and all that were off base and I apologize — I think we
both got a little over dramatic with our verbiage. I still do not agree
with you regarding watermarks, but I do not wish to make an enemy of you.
Indeed, there are already too few enthusiasts out there to do that. I’m not
sure how we could compromise, but we could at least agree not to fight about
it, and I could delete all of both of our comments on VC&G (that contain our
arguments) if you agree to it as well.

If you really want access to my scans unmodified, I am willing to provide
them to you without watermarks, providing that you don’t turn around and
publish them somewhere else instantly. Forget all that “fair use,”
“copyright,” “publisher” talk, etc., I just want to protect the work I put
into doing it (at least for a short period of time), whether it’s legal or
not (I of course, think it is, but we should put that aside, as I assume you
don’t really mind that I am trying to entertain with these ads). I hope you
can understand that desire, and I hope we can, in fact be friends.

Let me know what you think,
Benj (RedWolf)

A second e-mail followed the first:

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:06:39 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

Jason,

As an extension of my last email to you, I thought about it some more and
decided that I will no longer watermark the images of ads that I put up on
GameSetWatch. I have deleted our argumentative comments on VC&G and
replaced them with a message saying that I will no longer watermark them. I
apologize for all the comments I made and would like for us to be able to
put this behind us and be friends. Sorry, again, for all the trouble.

Benj (RedWolf)

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:20:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Jason Scott
To: RedWolf
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

Are you saying that you will continue to watermark the ads that you post on
vintagecomputing.com?

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:25:01 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: Jason Scott
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

I’m not sure. I’m thinking about not doing it on VC&G too, as it is a
logical extension of my other statement. But think about this: would you
rather have the scans, provided as entertainment and with a watermark, or no
scans at all? I do put work into finding and scanning them, and I want to
get credit for that. Like I said, they’re not random scans of ads
(especially the VC&G Retro scan of the week), but ones I have spent many
hours going through my materials to find entertaining ones. Is the work I
put into doing that worth nothing?

Benj

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:42:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Jason Scott
To: RedWolf
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

You are asking me to validate your value structure, and as had already been
proven in our public conversation, they are absolutely non-compatible. So
that’s probably a dead-end to go down.

Your argument is what I call the “heavy lifting fallacy”, which says that if
it’s a lot of effort to lift a TV out of a store at night and get it through
the broken window, you’ve somehow “earned” the ability to own the TV. Your
ability to spend hours poring over someone else’s hundreds of hours of work
and cherry-pick decontextually amusing pieces does not earn you anything, in
a grander sense. So no.

And as for the “scans with watermarks” or “no scans”, I would choose no
scans, since damaged goods are often accepted by people in a general sense,
obviating energy spent to do scans down the road.

Your work is in your descriptions and writing about the scanned art and text
you are appropriating, including any ancilliary funds you acquire from your
writing skills and, apparently, driven hits to your site, since you’ve
chosen to go the advertising route. I have no issue with your own take on
the works and your writing regarding them. That is journalism, creative
writing, and most importantly, yours. The art is not. No amount of effort in
finding the art makes that different.

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:00:55 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: Jason Scott
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

Jason,

You are a smart man. But in my hasty, inferior, unwise, and youthful
judgement, and in light of what you have just said, I have chosen to change
my mind again. The watermarks will stay. Nothing personal. I really do
like your analogy about stealing the TV, though. I just wanted to tell you
because I have respect for you as a person and didn’t want you to think I
was lying earlier when you see watermarks on the next scans. I’m also sorry
to have lost a reader. Please do not sling my name in the mud; I will not
sling yours. We can both go our separate, supposedly mutually exclusive
ways.

Thanks for the enlightening conversation,
Benj

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:03:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Jason Scott
To: RedWolf
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

It is quite something that one person’s criticisms could make you act as you
have today.

During this conversation, Redwolf modified the comments area on his weblog entry, deleting all of our comments and adding the following two comments:

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Just as a note, there was a long argument here about watermarks that got a little overblown on all sides and I sincerely apologize. You win: I will no longer watermark the scans of ads I put on GameSetWatch.

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
I will also no longer scan anything because, according to Jason Scott, my value as a researcher, scanner, and commentator on the scans is valueless and “anyone can do it.”

Ultimately, of course, he removed even these two entries, leaving the entire conversation socked away from prying eyes. This is my main reason for “un-socking” it on this weblog.

So there we stand, with Redwolf sinking back into his self-made goulash of Adam Smith capitalism, squatters’ rights, and dismissal of goals, and I continuing to harken out my shrill calls of historic consistency, archiving, and some nebulous motivational cloud of “the greater good”. From any vantage point but our small arena, we surely seem the same sort of person, but I contend that, ultimately we are not at all.

So.

As I wrote in an essay a while back, I am never content to leave arguments with myself holding a negation (don’t do it) or someone else holding the negation (you shouldn’t do it) without, instead, redirecting that energy into something productive, with an extra bonus if the resulting project leaves the watching public richer for the effort.

I therefore now announce DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM, a fast-growing collection of scanned TIFFs, JPGs and PDFs of historic ads, catalogs and brochures. With hundreds of megabytes of scanned items in just the last 24 hours (this is what I’ve been up to), I now present you the beginnings of my own massive archive of watermark-free, entertaining, enjoyable pieces of the past, most of it going back 20 or more years to the innocent days of the dawn of home computerdom.

I’ll likely cover a few of these items in upcoming weblog entries… and I hope you all enjoy them.

Under the glory of the Red Flag,
Jason

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I put in the hours; I spend a lot of time doing stuff for the various textfiles.com projects, documentary research/work, and assistance (behind the scenes) of a number of other altruistic endeavors. I get to shoot a few arrows once in a while. Here they are, all presented in one convenient package instead of blown across a pile of weblog entries. Maybe I’ll make this a yearly thing.

Librarians: I Generally Don’t Like Them

I was pretty stunned when I went down to the Princeton Public Library to give a talk about the BBS Documentary. I met something I rarely encounter: a happy, self-effacing librarian. His name was Robert Keith, and he was great to interact with and talk to, and totally on top of everything. As he proudly toured his excellent library for me, I was taken aback at how nice the whole place was, how much they thought about what was good for the patrons (again, this was the public library, not the University library), and how much they worked to make it a place you’d want to go to again and again.

This is not my usual experience with librarians.

In high school, my librarians would clip out photos or articles they thought inappropriate for students; nothing like opening a magazine and finding actual physical gaps in your reading material. I’ve watched libraries dump piles and piles of paperbacks, manuals and hardcover books to make room for, among other things, CDs. There’s a book by Nicholson Baker called Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper which makes any reasonable person want to take a Duraflame log and smack the involved parties across the face.

I find a lot of librarians really want to be gatekeepers; deciding what’s important, granting people access to their “incredible skillsets” and otherwise playing paternalistic/maternalistic control games over the information in their empire.

I read a few weblogs that piss me off, just so I can remember that not everyone is Andy Baio. One of these is Jenny Levine’s The Shifted Librarian, which is right up there in terms of self-important gatekeepers who want to hand out the world in dribs and drabs as they proudly “discover” stunning “new” technology like RSS. Out of my fuckin’ way, please, I have stuff to do. As an extra bonus, she links on her front page to Why You Should Fall To Your Knees and Worship a Librarian, a self-important essay of proportions my tiny mind can barely comprehend.

Here’s what I do: I collect, I assemble, I give away. Repeat. Forever.

Watermarking: Because You Own a Scanner

There are a huge collection of folks out there who dance on the razor’s edge of intellectual property. They do it for a variety of reasons, but some of them do it to “save” the history. So explain to me why the hell a place that would scan in old material would feel the need to watermark up the stuff they scan in? Vintagecomputing.com isn’t the only one to do it, they’re just the most recent (the editor started his weblog late last year). What the fuck? Why does your ability to operate a scanner and get your hands on old stuff suddenly entitle you to spray your flash-in-the-pan site’s logo across all the graphics? Is it to drive hits? (That is, make money off your site.) Is it ego? (People should know that when the chips were down and someone had to plug a scanner into a USB port, you were the man in charge.) Or is it just because you think that’s what has to be done? Either way, stop that shit. Save history, don’t try to become it by waving your site’s scrotum over someone else’s artwork/effort.

Amateur Time-Management Coaches

Few thematic responses drive me more crazy in message bases than “[Person who did project] has way too much free time.” I see a lot of amazing stuff out there, both online and off, where someone dedicated a few hours across a few months to a project. The same amount of time you might dedicate to, say, getting a basement clean or writing out Christmas cards. Whether it’s porting the game of Doom everywhere or building a church out of legos or draw something incredible using MS paint…. well, why the hell shouldn’t people chose to do that? Is it some sort of crime?

When I worked as a temp, I was often given jobs that just skirted the edge of requiring meat to complete the task; I had one job where I was to answer any call that came through a certain phone, write down the number of the person calling, and then call an assigned on-duty lawyer. (This was so a legal team could be off for the holidays and still seem like they were right there, on the ball.) I did this for 5 days; I sat at a desk and waited for a phone call. Two came in across that 40-hour time period. Two. This was before one could assume there was Internet of some sort at every desk.

How much better that time would have been spent if I could have built a car-flinging trebuchet?

I don’t expect people to stop this lame “criticism” any time soon, but there you go. It drives me nuts.

Well, that’s a load off my chest. How about you?

5 Comments

I finally got around to uploading the History of Hacker Conferences speech I presented at Shmoocon:

http://www.archive.org/details/200601-shmoocon-hackercons

This has been edited for smarts, so I don’t sound like a complete idiot, only half of one. You either enjoy this sort of historical talk or you don’t; this is not my favorite talk I’ve ever given, mostly because it’s two talks and I didn’t have the nuts to split it like it should have been. Next time I won’t make such a mistake, or I’ll just make them podcasts or something.

I mostly edited out poor phrasings or pauses, not any major content.

At Shmoocon, they scheduled me up against Dan Kaminsky. I had 12 people in the room with me as a result. This means a whole 12 people have experienced the speech before this, and they get to hear how different it is after going through the Jason Editing Machine.

This is the talk that announced hacker.textfiles.com.

Enjoy!

Comments Off on A History of Hacker Conferences

This entry is mostly my giving back to all the people, the filmmakers and fans, who want to know about the projects I’ve done and the current one I’m doing. Here’s how the first weekend of filming of GET LAMP went. Some things went wrong, some things went right, and I learned a ton. It gets technical in some places, as I’m explaining what my thinking was. Feel free to ignore these parts if it’s uninteresting and focus on the pictures.

I had decided almost from the beginning of the research phase of the Text Adventure documentary that I would shoot in high definition, likely through the HDV standard, which is kind of a cheaper way to shoot high definition at the cost of a few aspects of color space and resolution. My intended camera at the time was a Sony Z1U, which retails for about five grand before extras, and which would work well with the editing software I use, Sony Vegas.

Towards the end of 2005, I became aware of another camera, the AG-HVX200 by Panasonic, which is essentially a high-definition big brother to the DVX-100, the footage of which I’ve seen and which, to my eye, looks very much like film and very beautiful. Within a short time, I decided the AG-HVX200 was the way to go. Unfortunately, the camera, which had been announced as being available at the end of December 2005, was dribbling out to the world in very small shipments.

My original plan had been to wait to get this camera, get the necessary stuff, do some test shooting to learn how it works (my way of doing this is to blow out a fun little short film, like a kung-fu scene or a music video) and then prepare for the movie itself, and shooting locally before travelling out to the more distant locations.

This all got blown out the window when I discovered, in January of this year, that Mike Berlyn was leaving the country, and possibly not returning. Mike Berlyn is the author or co-author of a ton of text adventure and adventure games, like Oo-Topos, Suspended, Infidel, Cutthroats, Tass Times in Tone Town, and Dr. Dumont’s Wild PARTI. He was a “critical interview”, one where people would ask “So, why didn’t you get that guy?” if I didn’t have some footage of him. While it would certainly be the case that I could do the film without a few “critical interviews”, it was worth my while to be able to get as many as possible. (The BBS documentary missed a few, but got a bunch of others, which I can live with).

Mike and his wife Muffy were leaving in the beginning of March, having sold off their home and most possessions, and had no timetable for ever returning. I asked if I could come interview them at the end of February, and Mike agreed.

The first thing I did was get on the waiting lists at three different Panasonic dealerships, one in Oregon, one in Texas, and one in Massachusetts. None requested money down, and all were selling the camera I wanted for about six thousand dollars. Thanks to the Adventurers’ Club, this was not a scary amount of money to face. So I got on the lists and waited and bit my nails.

Meanwhile, I contacted a couple other people to interview; a teacher named Jon and Alexis Adams, who co-founded Adventure International. I scheduled them for the Sunday after the Saturday with Mike Berlyn, so I’d have a lot of space to do Mike’s interview.

As luck would have it, Omega Broadcast Group got a HVX-200 in and offered it to me, and I purchased it immediately, paying extra to have it fedexed to me the next day. So I was out six grand but with a very nice camera to show for it. I’d already bought a new wireless clip mic for people to have as well as the boom mic I have normally recorded with, allowing me double the protection to get the sound right. And I’d bought a few other new items, like a carrying case and tripod and so on. So ideally, I was now set for Florida.

But.

Now, here’s where it gets complicated. The HVX-200 doesn’t take tape. And what I mean is, it DOES take tape, but not to shoot in high-definition. If you use tape, you can only record in standard definition. If you want to record in high definition, you have to use one of three mediums, currently:

• P2 Cards, dedicated cards that can record the video, and which you can transfer to your laptop.
• Hard Disks with specialized cases that can stream in the video from the camera
• A laptop running the right software (currently certain editing programs like Avid Xpress or Final Cut Pro.

Of these, the Hard Disks are actually the most cost effective, but they don’t currently exist, and don’t expect to until sometime March at the earliest. The laptop is a good second place, but the software you need to buy to get the streaming video is currently between $1200-$1400, and that’s because you have to pay for the full editing package as well as the capture utlity… but I just want the capture utility! I edit my own way, with my own software that doesn’t currently capture the video from the camera I own.

This leaves P2 cards. P2 cards are really frigging cool. You plug them into the camera and record silently. When you press the record button, it’s instantaneous, because the camera just starts shooting data at them. And you can hot-swap them. And view the scene you just shot in real-time, skipping around to different cuts within milliseconds. It’s very neat.

It’s also astoundingly, astoundingly expensive. An 8 gigabyte card, which will hold 20 minutes of 720p video (which I am shooting in), costs $1400. FOURTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS. This is down from $1800 earlier this year. If you can live with half that, ten minutes of 720p video, it’s “only” $675.

It is not realistic to shoot less than an hour at a time. So that’s $1400 x 3. $4,200. To be able to shoot an hour of high definition video. That is insane. That is not valid.

Now, it was Monday before the shoot that upcoming weekend. So, completely walled in, I chose to try to rent these cards.

As it turns out, there’s a great local place, Rule Broadcast Systems, that rent and sell video and audio equipment. They’re tip-top quality. They also had both an HVX-200 for rent, along with the cards. The question was, could I rent just the cards?

As it turned out, I could. After going through a credit/professional check, I was able to rent 4 cards, two 8gb and two 4gb, from Wednesday afternoon to Monday morning, for about $460, including insurance and a couple other fees. This was great, giving me time to experiment with the camera, learn how it all worked, and so on.

The thng to note here, however, was that I had basically given myself less than three days to try out my equipment, learn how to use it, find the best settings, and practice my arranged settings before setting off in a plane to Florida to do a one-shot deal interviewing someone who would not be available again. The potential for disaster was great. And as it turns out, I met that potential.

After a whirlwind of practice, I flew down to Florida. As mentioned before, I hate flying, but we had a great deal on JetBlue and I tend to enjoy those flights because they have DirectTV at every seat and TV does a great job of making me forget I am about to crash out of the sky. I got through the flight, as I always have, eventually.

In Florida, I booked a hotel room and tried out all the equipment. One of the lights died on the trip, but that’s the way it goes. It just needed a new bulb. I experimented with recording myself, setting all the lights, and sound, and so on. I needed hard drive space outside of the 80gb my laptop had to dump these cards, so I bought two 300gb external seagate drives at a nearby Best Buy. I tried everything out, and figured I was somewhat in good shape.

The next day, I called Mike Berlyn and got directions to the interview location.

The interview itself went great. Mike was patient, friendly, and helpful as I stumbled along with my new setup. I found the new setup somewhat clunky and weird, and I had a hell of time getting the sound right in an appropriate way for the situation.

After the first 30 minutes of interview, I checked the footage on the laptop and found it was too dark. Way too dark, almost unusable. The sound was good, but not the video. I made the right fixes on the camera and we shot for another hour. Later, I found out the clip mic was set wrong and that sound was distorted, but the boom mike picked him up perfectly, so we had great sound, as I cut out the bad channel.

There are ways around the dark footage. I have the sound, so I can just put the sound in with other footage (scrolling shots, photos, and so on) and get around it. I’ve done similar before. It’s not the end of the world.

Mike and his wife Muffy and I had a lunch at a local diner, and then we did some more interviewing. It all went well, we covered some great subjects. They were kind, gracious and absolutely wonderful to do an interview with.

The photos and a couple screengrabs from the interview are here: http://www.getlamp.com/photos/000berlyn. The whole page needs a little bit of tuning but you get the idea.

The next day, I interviewed the other two subjects. One of them, Jon, is a teacher who used Text Adventures in classes. We had a real fun time, covered a lot of ground, and had some fine pizza delivered in.

Now, this is key to understand:

The interview with Jon is not usable.

I messed up. I set something wrong, and the sound did not come out right. A dumb mistake, the kind of mistake that you wouldn’t make if you had a camera for more than 3 days before shooting with it. But I made that mistake, and I have to live with it, with an interview that didn’t come out. I felt depressed about it that night, and then called Jon and offered to fly him up later in the year to Boston, my expense, put him up, and re-interview him. To make things right, because his story was cool. Later in the year, I’ll have my act together with all the equipment and we’ll nail it.

I mention this, make this admission, because I want people out there making films to know this sort of thing happens. I am a veteran of over 200 conducted interviews. I shot hundreds of hours of footage, and had years of training, and this mess-up still happened. I leveraged the lack of experience with the equipment for the quality of the shots and the ability to interview someone before they were gone forever, and in doing so, there was collateral damage. It happens. It doesn’t mean you should give up, or walk away. It means you get to try again. You take the shot, give it another try, you keep moving. I’ll keep moving.

The sum total, however, was positive. The critical interview was gotten. Of the other two interviews, the third came out “pretty good”, as I’d made the same mistake in sound but the setup made up for it and I can save the sound without any problem. So the result was that I got a few hours of good solid interview.

A few scrapes, a little clang, but the ship has sailed. I’ve started the GET LAMP documentary. I am taking a month to get the rest of the equipment I need (the external camera-compatible hard drive) and then I will begin filming in earnest. I will be doing this at least until the end of the year. I will push on. And I will finish it.

It’s never easy. I just want that known. Don’t think it ever is. I save money by having a one man crew, but I also open myself to risks of mistakes because I have nobody to double-check my work. I take this balance and do my best. If you’re out there, making your own sets of risks and benefits, you’re not alone. Keep it going. Just keep it going.

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A couple people joked with me and said “Hells YEAH I’d be in a remake of Gorp!” For fun, I started playing “What if” with the whole thing, just to see who owned it, what they thought of it, and so on.

I found this snippet of an interview with the author of the screenplay of Gorp (Jeffrey Konvitz) on a site called Red Hot Planet. It actually explains a bit:

You also wrote a “coming of age” comedy called GORP. The 1980 movie is memorable for two reasons: it was the final film released by drive-in purveyor, American International Pictures, and the cast included then-unknown actors Dennis Quaid, Rosanne Arquette, Michael Lembeck, Debi Richter and Fran Drescher.

GORP was based on my own experiences as a waiter at a camp in the Catskill mountains though, of course, most of it was fictionalized. I was a waiter at the camp and a lot of my co-waiters are now very famous people in the arts, sports, politics, etcetera-but they shall remain nameless. Anyway, I sold the spec screenplay-written right after ANIMAL HOUSE had opened to “hitdom”-to (AIP prez) San Arkoff. His son, Lou, and I produced it and it had a lot of ANIMAL HOUSE humor to say the least. We were also lucky to get a lot of actors at the dawn of their careers. Just to show you what I know, I told Fran Drescher, sometime during the shoot-all shot at a work camp in Georgia in February of, I think, 1978-that she had to get rid of her accent or she’d never make it. What a genius, eh?

Joe Ruben was the director and he had a lot of success later. Chuck Russell was our first AD and Chuck went on to do THE MASK and so much more. Virtually all the characters were based on composites of real people I had known at the camp. The budget was about two million and, of course, the second day of the shoot-exteriors at a summer camp-we had a blizzard that dumped two feet of snow on our heads. But that’s movie making, The film had as very successful pre-release screening history, but then ran into trouble in its distribution. Just as we finished the answer print, Sam Arkoff sold the company to Filmways and the owner of Filmways, an orthodox Jew and UJA chairman I believe, did not like the raunchy humor, particularly where it concerned the camp rabbi and he ordered the film buried. Now I am a pretty serious Jew myself and virtually everyone involved with the film was Jewish, but we all knew and still know how to laugh at what’s funny…and the film is funny. It did not receive th fate it received. But so be it.

Jeffrey Konvitz wrote it, but he based it at least in some part on a short story by Martin Zweiback. I wouldn’t mind reading that short story. You know, to get the literary background.

Zweiback, to be fair, probably didn’t recognize his short story in what the final work came out as. (He actually has a rather storied history of his own, including the legend of how he got a film made by Katharine Hepburn by throwing his screenplay over her walled garden.)

A couple things at this juncture:

• TWO MILLION!??!?? WHAT THE FUCK! HOW MUCH IS TANK RENTAL IN 1978!??
• Hey, there’s actually a little bit of a neat backstory to this thing.

Anyway, it’d be fun to do a remake, like I said. But a lot would have to happen for this to be the case. And in the meantime, I have this other little film I’m working on….

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I recently subjected a good friend of mine to a DVD showing of a 1980 musical called The Apple, one of my favorite films. I didn’t warn him or anything, but somehow he got through it. (I should probably make a note that I am not recommending this film to you.) What keeps any reasonable person going all the way to the end of The Apple, which is part of its magic, is the obviously gigantic amount of money, time and effort poured into it. While watching it, ignoring my friend’s slack-jawed incredulity at this monstrous endeavor, I keyed into a minor but important change in the film they’d apparently made in post-production, cutting out a last musical number and tacking on a convoluted end-scene.

Discussing how this must have been accomplished in a day’s reshoot drifted the conversation into what sort of films I would make if I ever worked on fiction instead of documentary, and then, ultimately, this ponderable that my friend dropped into my lap:

“What Hollywood film would you remake if you could choose from any one, with the exception of The Apple because if you remake that and force me to watch it again I will kill you in your sleep?”

After a minute of thought, I answered: “Gorp“.

Gorp is a summer camp movie that came out around 1980. It was shot very cheaply, and is at most points extremely crude, vicious and offensive. I first saw it on cable when I was a pre-teen, and when I was in my early 20s I found it on VHS and bought the tape immediately. It was $3, and I got it at a Caldor’s department store in the remainder bin. I remember my delight at finding it.

Shot in the middle of the “Animal House – Meatballs – Teen Exploitation” wave of films of the late 1970s-early 1980s, Gorp has little to recommend it to the naked eye. Or the un-naked eye. Or really, any level of taste whatsover. But there are a couple major reasons why I would remake such a film.

First of all, the entire story is told from the point of view of the kitchen staff. The children of the camp and the counselors, normally the center of all the attention in these movies, are in many ways ancilliary, foils against the main characters, who are the cooks, waiters, and maniacs running the food service. In fact, the whole of the interest of the camp is from the staff point of view, with the little politics, the craziness, the evil pranks all being rained down by (ostensibly) adults hired to take care of the campers. There’s a nice sub-plot involving the owner of the camp extracting money (in the form of fines) from the staff, secretly cutting his costs by trapping everyone in insane rules and ordinances. There’s a what’s-to-lose sense about the whole endeavor as the building that houses the staff is destroyed in a near-pointless “war” at the end of the picture that involves a tank and a maniacal Dennis Quaid (in one of his first co-starring roles). As if the blended stew of sex, violence, and viciousness wasn’t enough, it’s a Jewish summer camp; how many summer camp movies have anyone chanting the Motzi?

Second of all, and this one’s a little hard to explain, but the movie is really not done very well. It was shot for cheap money, I doubt anyone got any significant salary, a lot of stuff is obviously first-take-let’s-print, and there’s just an overriding sense of slapdashedness throughout the production.

As a result, I look at this film like a really messed up old car one finds in the back of a lot where the place took it just to get a trade-in. Some car where you can see where they messed with it, and yet it still runs and just needs someone to, you know, completely redo it from the frame up.

I remember watching this film, eating cereal at the apartment complex in Fishkill, NY, sitting on my little mattress in the room that all four of us slept in to save money on heat, and thinking, at 11 years old, I COULD DO THIS.

That’s a key feeling. With a lot of stuff, if you’re young, you just sit back in awe at all the magic, unable to discern how it’s done, having no clue how human beings did this and not just some wonderful machine from space that has godlike powers. While a sense of wonder is a precious thing to have, its dark side is a feeling of never being able to achieve something like this, to want to think about doing something so intimidating, so impossible to learn. I watched Caddyshack a hundred times in my early youth; I never could fathom ever making a film like that.

Gorp showed me that I could do it. I could totally see how they would set up shots, how the scripting would go, how they would cut stuff together. I got the idea, with Gorp. Since the actors have very little direction in the film, it feels like a home movie at different points, although most home movies don’t get a tank to crash through sets. (They should).

The writing has to depend utterly on people talking because they can’t afford sweeping shots. The film, in fact, is so cramped in terms of shooting (lots of long takes because they don’t have time to determine reverse-angle cuts) that I totally got it, even at 11. And I wanted to do something like it.

I would love that. I would love taking 30 days and 20 college students and a few older actors, renting some blown-out resort location, and just whaling out a version of Gorp. We’d keep the sex, knock up the charm, spin the vulgarity, mix up the interactions a bit better, truck in 100 kids for a day for the cafeteria scenes, get a few amateur demo/stunt guys, and break every rule in the book throwing this thing together. We’d borrow crazy equipment, surplus gear, and ruin a lot of plates of food.

Will this ever happen? I seriously, seriously doubt it. But I wanted to mention that inspiration comes from some pretty weird places, and for me, Gorp set me on the path to a sense of the possible. Sometimes when a magician fails, he’s actually teaching his young audience to be magicians, so they can, in their own future lives, not suck.

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In my nascent days of system administration, one of the highlights of my job was the opportunity to name new machines as they joined our legion of servers. Eventually, of course, my highlight was being able to write a script that would enable me not to be at my job while it happily chugged away and earned my salary. But in the days when I showed up early and left very late, the Naming of the New Box was paramount.

The company I worked for was in the process of moving away from VMS machines and starting to integrate UNIX into their environment, and I was lucky enough to be the sprout they reached out to to help with the transition. The manager who oversaw the VMS and UNIX administrators had an additional requirement in his hiring process that other people in his position might not: he didn’t want freaks.

Even though everyone in our group was technically proficient (except me, by comparison), you would have been hard pressed to know that they were system administrators and not, say, bartenders, busdrivers, or cooks. Regular folk, able to interact with their co-workers or outside parties and be regarded as just another person in the chain, not an ivory tower monarch or bucket of tics and snorting high-pitched whine. While they could tell you, if you wanted to know, why the I/O slowdown on writes in your disk array could be better improved with proper regard of their distance from the bus, they could also control themselves to NOT tell you if that wasn’t at the top of your priority to know. Dig?

Our manager prided himself on this. To weed out freaks, he had an interesting approach to a “trial period”. He would hire new folks as consultants, giving them a 30 day contract at a sizeable per-hour fee. Both sides won; the new recruit got fat bags of cash every week for a month, and the manager got to see them in action to know if the group was going to accept this new cog in the machine or reject them like a bad kidney.

This early warning system got tripped with the addition of a new admin into the group, who got through the interview process through some means I still do not understand. In her first day (her first day!) as a consultant, she sprayed into the organization all the true attributes of UNIX freakdom:

• Interrupted the General Manager during his “welcome to the company” meeting to correct him on points she disagreed with;
• Refused to sit in her cubicle until her desk was disassembled and reattached so the screen was no longer facing the opening;
• Demanded to go through the company’s inventory of chairs until the right level of back and arm support was found (this took some time);
• Spent her time while waiting for her cubicle/castle to be built to her liking to walk around and CORRECT EVERYONE.

This last bit can’t really be emphasized enough; her base state was that of talking to you and correcting you, telling you flat out in a conversation (which she started more than not) where you were wrong, uninformed, or lacking the basic facts to make an assessment. She also had some sort of throat issue that would cause her to look away and make a sound not unlike a cat ejecting a hairball. It was strange the first time, troubling the second time, and a circle of Hell by the third.

Our manager obviously knew, and let us know in various meetings, that the consultancy of our newest addition was to be the full term of her employment. But work needed to be done, scripts needed to be written, and meetings needed to be held, so the weeks dragged on.

Her style of UNIX freakdom came out all the time; rewriting scripts she was asked to fix minorly so only she could understand them; writing everything in lowercase, scripts or letters; going from zero to screaming hatred talking about things only she cared about, whether it was a network setup approach or the choice about how much swap space to add to a machine. We cringed in our cubicles as she berated coworkers on minor points, spoke on the phone about the most useless inanities with fellow freaks in lands unknown, and the snorting; always the snorting……

Somewhere in the depths of this dark age, our Usenet News Server needed to be replaced. This was in the days when a News Server was something you built with pride for your internal network, and not something you immediately outsourced to a professional firm to deal with the unending headache. In a percieved version of overkill, we had a nice new machine, disk array with 80 gigabytes of space, the whole kit. Again, however, the most important aspect to me was the naming.

My suggestion, PORNFUNNEL, was immediately vetoed.

Still, we went back and forth about possible names, and the cutest one to place on the machine was PAPERBOY. Delivers the news, right?

You can imagine my horror, to my innocent ears, when our new consultant, hearing of our planned name, said “You can’t do that name; it’s sexist.”

Sexist! Keep in mind that as a young person new to his job, I had not actually encountered such a corrective mindset, but only heard about it as one hears about many mythic fools and freaks in the world. I had assumed this was just a stand-up joke, a threat that parents whispered to their children at night to make them study harder in school! And you can imagine the topper for me when I asked her what her suggestion for a better name would be:

“Paperperson”.

Fear gripped me as we attempted to continue a civil conversation about the Naming of the Usenet Server with this new blanket of limitation on the process. Bland names were put forward and we came dangerously close to implementing the actual name “news”. How dull. How silly.

But then it hit me. Glancing around with the best poker face I could muster, I said “How about…. page 3?”

The lead admin in the group, a man born in England, started to show glee, then quickly hid his emotion and said “yes, that sounds acceptable”. We both looked at the new admin and she paused, before saying “Sure, that’s good, I guess.”

For the folks at home who might not have read newspapers in the UK, a number of the London Tabloids had taken to including topless pictures of women in their pages, each presented smiling and tits to the wind, with a little blurb about their jobs and thoughts on the world beneath them. It was, essentially, using sex to sell more newspapers, in what would be considered a pretty crass and cynical manner.

Because there was still some amount of division between newspapers and adult publications, the photos of these fair, topless lasses were put on page 3.

And that’s how PAGE3 was born. As expected, the new admin worked out her contract and was not offered a permanent position. PAGE3, however, worked on for years after her, happily serving its role in life as a porn funnel.

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My talk in April at Notacon on Wikipedia is coming up, and should be either fun or interesting (or maybe even both). As part of that I’ve been both observing and in contact with people embedded in Wikipedia, and I figured it was time to make some predictions. Make of these what you will. I’m focusing on the “negative” predictions since everyone else is in the business of the “positive” predictions. Some of these might sound obvious, some might not; that’s the way of “predictions”.

Note again, this is about Wikipedia, not the general concept of the Wiki. In all of these cases, I am predicting all of these things to happen before the end of 2006, although I suspect some will happen by the summer.

Wikipedia will no longer allow anonymous edits of any kind.

One of the core aspects of Wikipedia from its beginning was the ability of anyone to edit anything at any time. While nice in theory, this approach fails under critical mass. The work of the programmers of Wikipedia’s software and the increase in tools to track edits has cut down on pure unchecked destruction, but the fatigue of an ever-growing army of people who actually want to do minor edits and little else is wearing out on people who wish to control the encyclopedia’s direction.

A flurry of press implied that this is already the case; in fact, anonymous editors cannot create completely new articles, but they can edit existing ones. Currently, if you edit an article and do not have an edit history, your edit is often undone until you “prove” yourself. This trend will continue, in my opinion, and I expect they will move to some level of registration and reduced user account creation, walling the garden from the point of view of the editing active user.

Wikipedia will have to split off “user space” from “Encyclopedia space”.

Right now, you, as a Wikipedian with an account, can have a page about yourself, the stuff you’re into, what Wikipedia work you’re doing, and so on. It is absolutely tearing Wikipedia apart.

Why it’s tearing Wikipedia apart is part of my talk at Notacon, but the short form is that these user pages, once simple waves from behind the screen to talk about what you’re up to, have become pulpits of controversy and hatred that are linked (even if not completely) as if they’re just more articles under Wikipedia.

The solution is simple: a “user.wikipedia.org” or “wikiusers.org”, a separate area allowing this sort of self-expression to continue.

I see absolutely no fault in this happening; it should have been done from the beginning. In the beginning there weren’t really “user accounts” at all on Wikipedia, so it kind of grew organically from the natural urge of people to go “look at me, look at the work I’ve done, here I am, making my place”. But this is causing huge, huge distress on both the infrastructure, and the “anyone can edit” approach. The whole point of a user space is that you control it, and having others come in and either “fix” your work or tell you you’re not “allowed” to have things in your user space is causing wasteful friction even by Wikipedia’s standards.

Either this will happen soon, or more people will leave/pull back from being treated like they joined the world’s largest homeowner association.

Jimbo Wales will be either ousted or have his power curtailed relative to Wikipedia.

Without a doubt, Jimbo is a vital part of Wikipedia’s success. His funding, initial guidance, and approach to the site are what helped bring in the critical mass of editors. Unfortunately (for him), he has also created an entity whose entire point of existence is an overriding anal-retentive attention to “policy” and “the rules”, all reached by a variety of methods, each with their own set of “policy” and “the rules”. And so on, and so on, like a hall of mirrors.

The newspaper articles about Wikipedia in the last six months have focused on two major “events”: An article in the journal “Nature” that compared a whopping 42 articles (out of 972,000) to decide all of Wikipedia had only 20 percent less errors than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and errored information in an entry about a man named John Seigenthaler with the attendant hand-wringing about “what is truth” and “what position does Wikipedia and The Internet hold in the nature of accuracy”.

What has not gotten any focus are moves by Jimbo Wales that skirt and avoid “policy” or “consensus” or any of the other buzzwords that users who edit Wikipedia live by. He has appointed administrators without following Wikipedia’s own “rules” on how that is done. He has had articles not just removed, but their entire editing history removed as well (this violates their own license). He has blanked out and locked down (prevented editing) on articles about people who have threatened him with a lawsuit. And in cases where he has encountered activities he doesn’t approve of and appears concerned of looking bad (editing his own biography was a minor offense), he has taken on the approach of mentioning idly what he’d like to see done, and an army of folks will do his bidding, out of a natural urge to follow the “leader”.

This dichotomy cannot continue; Wales makes appearances on television shows and in newspaper articles speaking in a tone as if he majorly or solely guides the direction of Wikipedia, while at the same time promotes an environment where people are led to believe that a consensus guides Wikipedia. Something has to give.

(Of all my predictions, I am weakest on this one, because power is pernicious in its effect on sense, and few things are more steely-gripped than a person holding onto power.)

Wikipedia will make it almost impossible to edit entries on living people (or any entity that can sue).

I’m vaguely cheating with this prediction, since this is already becoming the case. If you don’t like an article about yourself in Wikipedia and you wish to ensure that the entry on you contains no information you don’t like, threaten to sue Jimbo Wales. Threaten to sue the Wikimedia Foundation. There are notable cases where entire swaths of information have been pulled down for shaky reasoning, simply to get legally-concerning items out of Wikipedia.

This is the bucket of cold water that will affect the love-fest of editing on Wikipedia more than anything else. There are facts that are, by any measure, accurate and real (dirty deeds listed in public records, criminal histories, and so on), that are simply not ‘allowed’ to be on Wikipedia. They are blanked out (again, not put into a “document editing history”, but all trace of them removed) and in a few cases the articles have been locked so that no work can be done on them.

This is working for the moment, but it can only increase in frequency, so it is likely that a rule will be put in place, phrased in relatively neutral language, that will prevent living entities from getting too detailed a background in anything but the most basic of facts about them. And it is because of lawsuit threats.

Subpoenas are the ultimate edit.

Wikipedia will add advertising (banner ads, text ads, or pop-ups).

What’s the sound of a million people going “Well, Duh”.

I only make this prediction because there are a number of myths that people who do editing work on Wikipedia and who pour weeks of life into the production operate under. One of them is the idea that the Wikipedia will always be open and free and sans the grubby hands of capitalism fingerprinting their work with urges to buy, buy, buy. Apparently the story of CDDB has not had an effect on them. That’s fine.

A lot of people are offering Wikipedia a lot of money to put advertising into their pages. One day, they will win. I just happen to think this is the year.

Check back in 2007 for how many I got right or wrong.

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I am terrified of planes. I don’t discuss it much because, well, what is anyone going to do about it?

I should also say I’m not terrified of the planes themselves, just being in them when they’re flying.

Flying is a complete torture to me, from the moment I board until it slowly taxis towards the gate after landing. I am literally in a state of pure fear for most of the time, until I reach some sort of anguish threshold and collapse onto myself, often into sleep. I wake up and I’m just messed up enough that I don’t really realize where I am, and then eventually we land, during which time I am back in terror.

Why do I fly? Because logically, it is the fastest way to get to places, and when doing my films or meeting people who I care about or respect, I don’t want “it’ll take too long to get there” to be a reason not to see them. I do it, one might say, for a form of love. Love of people, love of my work, wanting things to be done and not to hide away in a cocoon of intentions and rough sketches. So I take it, like a beating. I’m usually back to normal around an hour or two after landing.

Occasionally, very rarely, I can reach some sort of zen moment where I forget where I am and why I am here and everything that can go wrong and just look out over clouds. At that point, I consider the span of my life, the things I have done and the things not yet done. And inevitably, I always think about how I didn’t get down any of my Fundamental Truths.

One of life’s many little jokes is that we don’t start to get a real grip on stuff until it’s often too late to do anything about it. The worst part is that we get told by others who are later in their lives how they got a grip, but we often don’t listen. Or we sort of listen and then drop it. So, I’m going to write two things that have been getting on my mind a lot recently, and leave it at that. It’ll let me feel a little better that I put it down somewhere, the next time I board a plane (February 24th, actually).

Everything has a Lifecycle.

I’ll describe this truth within the context of the three obvious examples: Jackie Chan, Lloyd’s of London, and Slashdot.

Jackie Chan, international movie star, beloved kung-fu action hero, and worldwide beloved charity head/businessman, was born in 1950. As has now been documented countless times (including the excellent autobiography I am Jackie Chan), he had an extremely hard childhood: put into a Peking Opera training school where he was abused and subject to all manner of physical training/trials which, ultimately, had little use in the modern world upon his teenage years and graduation from the school. From this, he got involved in construction and odd jobs in Australia, before taking on stunt work in the Hong Kong film industry. He got small parts in films, and then got fashioned as a “New Bruce Lee” upon Lee’s untimely death. His talents, physical skills and self-reliance have resulted in many excellent films containing action sequences and stuntwork that he’s played a part in.

However, Jackie Chan has a life cycle. He is in his 50s now, entirely unable to do some of the work he was doing in his 20s, and risks he took in his early film career would now be past suicidal. He is obviously going to continue to make films, and add his mark to them, but to expect him to do some of his earlier work is both unrealistic and refusing to think of him as a person who is growing older and into different directions; he has tried romantic films, producing other films that simply have his name on it, and basically branching out. While I would love a world where Jackie created new films equivalent in approach to Police Story and Drunken Master, there is simply not the same Jackie Chan that made those films available to do them. His life has gone on.

Similarly, Lloyd’s of London, being hundreds of years older than Jackie Chan, has a more involved life cycle. There are also many recountings of its history (an excellent one is here) but here’s a short form.

Started as a coffee house by Edward Lloyd in the 17th century, located on the docks, had good business from sea traders and runners providing information on shipping, and facilitated this with writing supplies and desks. After Lloyd’s death, the swarm of illegitimate business in underwriting led a group to split off and call themselves “Lloyds” and do underwriting. Throughout the next two hundred years, Lloyds has had a number of ups and downs, both insuring unusual items and paying out/taking in enormous sums in celebrated cases, including the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and a variety of celebrity body parts.

The Lloyd’s of the 17th century was wildly different from the Lloyd’s of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. But there is this “tradition” and “history” urge that people have to compare what it is to what it was, even though the very natures of the world Lloyds moves in have inherently changed. Fundamentally. While there will always be conceptual ideas (bad things happen, pay in against that in insurance, reap some reward in tragedy) that hold true, the nature of a life cycle means that the Lloyds you walk into today will be nothing at all like it was.

This is either really obvious or not so obvious. What I am saying here is that many people fall into the trap of pointing to the multi-hundred-year history of Lloyds as ongoing proof of its relevancy, or choices. While some of that might be true, nobody who works at Lloyds was alive when it started, or when it broke away from Coffee. Nobody there would have first-hand knowledge how it was functioning before World War I. Almost none would know how it functioned before World War II. There have been thousands, many thousands of meetings, arrangements and contracts that have shifted Lloyds in many directions since it was started. To point to how it was as indication of how it should be or lamenting how it has changed… that is denying this fundamental life cycle.

It is likely that 2050 will not see a Jackie Chan. But 2050 might see a Lloyds. But if it sees either, they simply will not be the same entities they once were, no matter what dollops of marketing, slow-moving montage films, or posters will proclaim.

It might be easier to then point to Slashdot, which will be celebrating 10 years of existence in 2007. Started by a couple college students, this discussion/news site has grown to enormous amounts of influence and power within online circles, guaranteeing not just a huge amount of hits to a site but lots of ancilliary attention and placement in minds outside obvious “geek” realms. Take it from me; I’ve been Slashdotted or caused Slashdottings a number of times and I’ve seen the effects. People call and contact you from amazing places when you’re Slashdotted.

The Slashdot of 1997 is nothing like the Slashdot of 2006. It has similar outward appearances, with the logo and color scheme being the same, but almost everything else is different: the staff, the underlying software engine, the hosting facility, the choices of stories and the nature of communication within it.

The founders are there to some degree, but they are simply not the same people; they are 9 years older. How co-founder Rob Malda is at 30 (which he will be in May) is a lot different than how he was at 21. To apply the same measurements of how he should act or play a part in the site, or draw on his statements when he was a recent college grad as indications of what he’s thinking today… it just makes no sense.

Slashdot was sold to an entity relatively early in its existence, which was sold to another entity. Slashdot is, primarily, a business, geared towards generating revenue for both itself and its related sites. It’s easy to forget this, and apply standards on it as if it was being run out of someone’s home, but that’s the fact. It’s also the fact that in some ways Slashdot itself will fall back on this, and not do the least bit of journalistic research or credible action, simply because there is no outward reason for them to do so; getting things fundamentally wrong has not affected readership, and the comments below each entry allow some amount of “wait, that’s wrong”, so little obvious effort shows up in the final, scrolling collection of new stories.

Pro or con, Slashdot has changed, and is changing ever onward, until it will disappear or be further unrecognizable from what it once was. As a historian, I am interested in the changes, and in the previous incarnations, but I try not to fall into the trap of acting like the Slashdot I load up on my browser is anything but an entity of the present day, subject to the pitfalls and triumphs of 2006.

So where the hell am I going with this?

History is not a template for the future. History is an explanation of why certain mistakes happened, why we got to where we are now, how we did it, and an excellent way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon. There is an enormous of hand-wringing, online and off, comparing the world of the present to the world of the past, and attempting backflips and neck-stretches to somehow use these past worlds as templates for the present one. We live in a world where you can contact your loved ones from a field or in a moving car, where you can know within seconds what someone is thinking about you, and where you can turn a frozen block of meat into a dinner better than princes once knew.

To ignore lifecycles and to use the past as shackles holding back progress or, at the least, inevitable change, is a mistake. Don’t do it.

There’s Fundamental Truth number one. I will relax the next time I see the wings shake.

Hatred Often Springs From Uninterested Audiences

A shorter Fundamental Truth, but one that I care very deeply about. I’ve been reading an enormous amount of online material lately (this always happens when I’m working on a project like GET LAMP) and what I find, more often than not, are dismissive or highly-critical treatises about creative or commercial works from people representing audiences the work should never have been put in front of.

Let’s stick with just movies this time.

The absolutely best Kung-Fu movie is still an absolute wreck to someone who doesn’t want to watch Kung-Fu movies. A person who wants to see a romantic comedy will never enjoy a zombie flick, no matter what amount of effort was made into making it the best zombie flick ever.

The nature of marketing and publicity is to expose a product to as wide an audience as possible. The issue with that is that often the work, through no fault of its own, is not actually geared towards as wide an audience as possible.

On the flip side, there are films that are most certainly geared towards as wide an audience as possible. They make certain concessions in plot, casting and shooting so that they will appeal to everybody who walks in the door. It is unlikely, therefore, that it will treat any one of those groups with much respect or satisfy them fully, but on the other hand they won’t lock too many people out, either.

This may or may not seem obvious. But how much energy has been wasted avoiding it!

I am asked about putting my BBS documentary in front of as wide an audience as possible. But I’ve spent a lot of time watching reviews and responses to it; and there are people for whom this is the greatest movie ever. They absolutely love it, they love the length, the subject matter, the approach, the shooting.

But I get people who hate it too. I find, generally, that they were misled by others as to what the film was, or they came in with a different expectation. (“Should have been more like Wargames. Should have had less people talking. Shouldn’t have been so technical”)

This is why I’ve always worked to make the film and its contents known, to have lots of preview material and descriptions that show it’s a very technical documentary that features a lot of people talking. If someone comes along and shows it with the inherent lie “It’s as amazing as Star Wars” floating in peoples’ heads as they watch it, it will be horrible. It is absolutely the worst episode of Star Wars ever. (Episode XI: I Keep Getting a Busy Signal).

I’m just sticking to movies here, but this Fundamental Truth applies to a lot of stuff besides creative works. It applies to education (being told a subject will be a certain type of experience in learning and it is not), to tools (being told a tool can be used a certain way when it doesn’t do that very well), and to people (presenting someone as having skills they do not have). In all these cases, these subjects all have very good uses and skills and abilities, but only if they’re presented the right way or are upfront. The energy then spent defending or criticizing the entire misfit characterization, dilutes the equivalent of many human lives over the years.

There. Now they’re both out. Enjoy them. And the next time you see me somewhere where I flew, realize how much I truly wanted to be there.

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