ASCII by Jason Scott

It’s kind of rare that I’m contacted by people simply because they assume I love text and the manipulation of it. That is, it’s one thing to go “here’s some old computer stuff, you would like it” and another for someone to go “as someone who can appreciate the creation and manipulation of text, you should be aware of this”.

This happened recently when Rod Coleman wrote to tell me about Sudden View, a (windows-based) text editor he’s been working on for about a decade and a half. But beyond just letting me know about it, he told me where to download it, and try it out. It’s really cool. And the reason it’s cool to me may or may not be, in itself, cool with you.

What Rod has done is sat down and tried to figure out alternative ways to interface with text. This is both easier and harder than it sounds.

A lot of times in the world, “good enough” is good enough. If it does what it says, especially if it’s incrementally better than what things are now, then people are pretty happy and that’s that. Radical leaps forward, while breathtaking, are usually ignored as “weird” or “hard to use” when in fact it’s more a case of “not like I saw before”.

This is why, for example, almost every computer has a thing that lets you save your current program’s data in the upper left corner of the screen. It’s better than what was there before, and yet there are likely potentially better ideas, that aren’t in wide use. I’m not saying that the file-saving-in-the-corner thing is wrong, just that it’s the way things are done and will, for lack of a new idea that’s widely accepted, be the way things are done for the future.

Similarly, a lot of text editors are just like each other so there’s a very quick ramp-up period, except the “new” text editor will add a few additional ways of saving out the text, or include mail merging, or make you coffee, or whatever.

Sudden View doesn’t do any of that, and that’s why I think it’s worth trying out. It represents one man’s journey to understand what about the process of editing text takes the most amount of our time, and what shortcuts we take in writing that come from frustration with a machine as opposed to what the best possible phrasing should be, and so on.

It is interesting to me how user interfaces influence final work. Once you see it in action, you start to re-think your relationship to machines. At Phreaknic this year, there was a short film shown on Saturday night with drunken antics of attendees captured on video. While watching it, I was struck with an odd feeling: it felt kind of like my documentary. Not in content, not in choice of angles, not in the flow of editing…. it was just this sense that it had come out of the same “factory” that my film had. Something about the way the shots switched to each other, the titles, the fades and fade-outs… it was like I’d made it, but completely different than I would have made it. This description sounds weird because the feeling was weird.

Well, it turned out they’d used the same video editing software I’d used. They hadn’t even used the same camera… it was the way that Vegas Video happened to interface with the user, to provide them with clips and transitions between those clips and timing, that made our films seem the same. It was very disconcerting; I thought I’d made something unique and myself, and I’d likely made a different model of a building out of the same popsicle sticks. Anyone who looked at them side by side would see similarities.

Once I saw that, a thousand ideas went off in my brain on how to do things better next time. By seeing where I was the same, I was, myself, improved.

Similarly, we write and compose and draw and e-mail people using programs that work similarly to each other. If you are always presented with the receptacle for your thoughts as a blank screen with a blinking cursor, and that cursor does the wrapping of words for you, and you have a mouse that selects text a certain way, and it’s this many clicks or keypresses to do this action… it starts to affect you. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

So it does good to take a trip in different shoes.

Am I saying that we should throw out all our current editors, and go with Sudden View, simply because the interface is different? I’m not saying that either.

But it’s rare to pull in a program that does something you do all the time, yet interfaces with it differently. The closest to this situation people usually get is with video games, which often have wild new interactivity… but not really. Point, shoot, load up, check your score… actually, it tends to be predictable more often than not.

The smartest thing Rod has done is make it so the beta test comes with a text file that contains an entire tutorial on trying out the editor. You walk through it, and you just start learning it. So here’s what I suggest.

Try it out. Download the thing and run it if you can. And focus on what it’s doing to your brain. You’ll likely feel the edges and firm walls in your mind you didn’t know were there, bumping against expectations and three-steps-ahead plans that your head was making. See if you can work this way, in this different language of interaction. A new user interface can show you what you might be falling into habit with regarding your silly little computer and how you deal with it.

And some people, might realize that this is how they want to edit text in the future, or demand features like this from future text editors.

It’s refreshing, like a walk in the park after you’ve been in a basement for too long.

And hey, it’s text. And Rod was right in that regard: I really do love text.

6 Comments

I attend a number of conferences over the months, usually as a speaker and sometimes as an attendee, hanging out, talking, having a good time. I wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be speaking at a convention called Notacon.

Notacon is going to be held in Cleveland, Ohio and will feature a bunch of speakers, events, contests, and all the good stuff that happens when you bring in a bunch of both technical and artistic folks together. It takes place from April 7th through 9th, 2006.

Why mention this so early? Because Notacon currently has a pre-registration period, and for cons that aren’t the size of an ocean liner, pre-registration helps them break even, since they get certain breaks and the ability to add more cool stuff to the proceedings. And this being the third year, they’ve really got the whole process down pretty pat. I always enjoy myself, and I would urge everyone to consider going to it, to try something a little different in the way of technical conferences. And because I’ve grown attached to the event, it’s not that hard to take a little time to tell people about it, how great a time it is, and that they should go. So there, I’ve done it.

My speech/talk I’ll be giving at Notacon is called “The Great Failure of Wikipedia”.

This is, not coincidentally, the same title as one of the entries in this weblog. It was the first time I talked publically about my feelings about the Wikipedia process, and it spawned a few more entries and clarifications. It also got me a lot of traffic, a lot of like, a lot of hate, and generally… a lot.

While a part of me wishes I’d never started writing about Wikipedia, what’s done is done, and the thousands of hits, hundreds of letters and all-around critical attention I’ve gotten because of it is the way of things. So why not go ahead and speak on the subject at a place I consider to be a worthwhile stage to do so?

The target is moving, of course. I’ve been working with a few folks who are investigating Wikipedia from within, and there are major changes afoot. And they’re going to continue. So the speech I intend to give may modify itself between now and April. But I do promise this: it will be fun, and it will be lively. That’s how I give talks.

So there we go, there’s an easy excuse to come to Notacon and watch me make a fool of myself in front of an auditorium of people. Or change their outlook forever. Who knows?

Oh, and one last thing, a small law I’d like to propose. Call it Jason Scott’s Law of Incredible Projects of Great Beauty and Wonder That You Can’t Believe Anyone Would Think Ill Of:

You cannot simultaneously self-aggrandize and self-deprecate your project as it suits your attempt to make people accept what you are doing as right and just.

See you there.

4 Comments

A little milestone went by in the last day or so: my site cd.textfiles.com has now surpassed 1,000,000 files hosted. (Actually, more like 1,029,000 and growing, but still, a friggin’ million.)

I don’t really go out of my way to talk about that site all that much, mostly because of the fact that it’s a legal threat magnet; hardly a month goes by without someone, somewhere, representing somebody, going bugfuck on me for having something on there they don’t like. As a result, I don’t publicize it and I truly intend never to monetize it.

If you haven’t been there, cd.textfiles.com is basically a massive collection of all those crappy shareware CD-ROMs being sold in stores, meets, online and elsewhere, which quickly became called “shovelware” because the “creators” of the CDs would shovel thousands of programs onto a CD-ROM and then sell it as a new product. In many cases, these guys would almost make it sound like they “created” the stuff themselves, instead of the fact they were putting it all on the backs of other guys who were distributing these files under a shareware license.

Without getting too much into the whole ownership thing, the fact is that people were out there collecting everything they could find on BBSes to sell it, usually without checking too closely what that stuff was. Then again, copyright infringement wasn’t the new crack, either, so some of these CDs are a bit wild and wooly in terms of content.

There’s mostly DOS and Windows-related discs, but also stuff for Atari, Apple II, Amiga, and what could best be described as “other”. And like I said, there’s over a million of them. Programs, pictures, songs, textfiles…. everything you could imagine, that someone might put online, probably has a few examples in this collection. To be sure, there’s a ton of doubled stuff, but in many cases I have various versions of a specific program or file, showing that all-too-important-and-easily-lost progression of a work over years. Why just see the last in a lineage that goes back a decade? So this thing is basically one huge-ass beneficial learning tool.

The primary beneficiary of all this, of course, is me. I have used this archive extensively in the past, either to check up on a fact, review the functionality of a program, or read documentation or textfiles regarding history. Facts and files from this collection show up in the BBS Documentary, and I’ve spent many a fine evening walking these directories and finding something new.

It brings up a small but important point: there are political and opinion-related issues that these files essentially solve. While there are certainly cases of lies or deceit or other untoward human aspects being reflected, there are also facts that have become muddied and lost over time, subject to people making claims because no-one is around or cares enough to confront them. And people like me, historians, we end up repeating these politically-charged misrepresentations because we have to go by the word of the person, if we have no evidence to the contrary.

Here’s an example off the top of my head. While he was not ultimately interviewed (scheduling issues) for the BBS Documentary, I spoke for quite some time with Bob Mahoney of the EXEC-PC BBS (his onetime employee Greg Ryan does make an appearance in the documentary), and during an extended phone call, he dropped a bit of a bomb.

He claimed he had come up with the name “ZIP” for extensions.

See, that’s quite a claim, and he said “I chose ZIP for Phil Katz when he asked me to come up with one, because it represented ‘fast’, like zipping around, and it was kind of sexy, like ‘zipper’, and I knew people would respond to it.”

Well, you see, Phil Katz died in 2000. I’ve never spoken to him, and never will. So I have no way to verify it.

Unless I go to the files! So looking on cd.textfiles.com for early versions of ZIP, I quickly found a thank you to Bob Mahoney, written by Phil Katz, thanking him for coming up with the ZIP extension. So there we go, controversy solved.

It is not a cure-all. It is another photograph, another album pulled out from the muck to allow historians to look up stuff.

It is of use to patent lawyers who need to cite earlier examples of a concept before some bastard makes 20 cents every time you buy a mug on ebay, or play a song in your browser.

It’s of use to people who want to remember how far we’ve come, looking at grotty, poor graphics (which, by the way, we loved) and simple one-level games. One of the real advantages of digital history is that, with a relatively minor amount of effort via emulators and wiring to old systems, we can experience the past in almost the same sense as it originally was intended to be experienced.

And it’s certainly of use to a bevy of names, places, and people who accomplished so much with so relatively little, preserving their identities in the modern era, when so much information could easily be lost.

I love that little site. All one hundred and twenty gigabytes of it. It’s caused its share of headaches and I’m sure it’ll continue to, but I can list a lot of reasons why it should stay up.

In fact, I can now list a million.

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I’ve opened up a little experiment, a little idea today. It’s called “The Adventurers’ Club” and here’s how it works.

The next documentary, GET LAMP, is about text adventures. The equipment I used to shoot the BBS Documentary is a bit long in the tooth, and there’s been a lot of advancement in the 4 years since I started shooting, and the 6 years since they started selling the camera that I used. So, I really need to buy a little more equipment to shore that up, and also to reach for a higher ground in terms of video and sound quality.

Also, I’m shooting in high definition. Yes, that’s right, I’m shooting a documentary about text adventures in high definition.

In fact, the price of HDV cameras have gone down considerably in the past few years, but it’s still a lot of money to put out there at once. Money’s always a stress, and I’m hesitant to start taking money out of the BBS Documentary project (which is still ongoing) and aim that in a new direction, if I can help it.

So, I decided to offer up a pre-sale subscription to the eventual product. I call it “The Adventurers’ Club”.

The webpage for it is here.

Here’s the pitch and the thinking. You pay in $100 now. You get a copy of the BBS Documentary DVD set immediately, and since I’m charging $40 for that, you’re actually (sort of) sending me $60.

When the DVD/movie is finished a couple of years from now, you get three copies sent to you. And you get them first before anybody. Also, you get your name in the credits, no matter where it goes; television, theatres, DVDs, Sony PSPs, Mobile Phones, Ipods, you name it.

In return, I end up with a financial boost which I can apply towards not playing “cheap-out” games in terms of purchasing equipment, lights, and other related items to making the thing look good.

Naturally, this is quite a level of trust I am asking of people. All I can do is point to the previous work and say “I’m going to do another film like that one.” Or, more accurately, “The guy who made that film is going to make another one.”

Will this fly? I don’t know. Here’s hoping. I’ll report here after the club is closed (I expect I will shut down investment after about a month and a half) how many people joined up.

The web page for the club explains the thinking and the details, so check it out.

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A friend of mine was kind enough to forward me some discussions between himself and a gentleman who has declared himself “The Founder of the BBS”.

His name is Bob Shannon, and he’s most certainly some level of “old school”; he’s done work with Commodores since the early 1980s, created a magazine for Commodores that sold many issues, is a grandfather, and he’s been doing photography for 40 years, so that earns him a few bones. Respect to Bob Shannon.

But Bob claims that he invented the BBS for Microcomputers, in 1982, writing a BBS for the Commodore Vic-20. There’s a number of problems with this statement, mostly involving reality. Ward Christensen wrote a BBS program (you might have heard me mention him once or twice) in 1978, in February. If you want to say that an S-100 kit computer isn’t really a “home computer” or “Microcomputer” in the standard sense, then I would point at Communitree BBS, written in either 1978 or 1979 (sources vary) for the Apple II (Later, it was re-written as a commercial product). There are BBSes dating throughout the late 1970s into the 1980s before Bob’s program shows up, although we’re talking about numbers in the low hundreds, so Bob is certainly no late-coming newbie.

Back in 1996, Bob merely claimed he was one of the first BBS software packages… which, if you take into context of a 20-year history starting in 1978, is not that hard to argue with; he’s probably in the upper echelon. But apparently the last 9 years have urged some reflection on Bob’s part, and he took to that vested authority Wikipedia to both delcare himself the Founder of the BBS and to tweak the entry on BBSes to reflect this new crown as “founder”.

My friend idly wondered if I could grind ol’ Bob, with his delusion of grandeur, into the dust. I figured that truth and accuracy do that anyway. But the greater issue here interests me.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered guys whose version of history are at odds with the “known” stories, or the “official” timelines and cast lists. In some cases, the people who have approached me or who I’ve talked with have presented such completely off-the-wall stories related to subjects I’m researching, that the whole of my entire knowledge of the subject would face turmoil should what they say be true.

But here’s the deal: I have to research them anyway.

Yes, it’s time I’ll never get back. But it’s relatively minor to do a bunch of research into a subject you know cold, with a new perspective…. compared to that person, that out-of-left-field opinion that showed up at your doorstep, turning out to be right. If by some bizzare set of circumstances they are telling the truth or are adding a view of history that is at odds with many other tales, then you are doing yourself and the world a disservice not to have listened.

My documentary didn’t cover this subject, but the circumstances of Gary Kildall’s death in 1994 were given to me in the form of nearly a dozen stories, many of which conflicted each other. The guy died, officially because he fell off a barstool. I am not inclined to agree with that story.

At one point, I recieved a phone call where someone claimed to be someone else I had already interviewed. I spent an evening verifying that I’d interviewed the right guy.

One potential interviewee claimed that a prominent BBS was a front for a child sex-slave ring. I had to go check THAT out. (It doesn’t seem to have been.)

If you’re in the business of facts, you can’t just crumple up people who come to you with different ideas and throw their opinions away. Perhaps you might not immediately grab their stories and go running to the world shouting “The Truth Is Here!” but you can’t just dispel ideas just because they’re different.

The secret downside of the way information travels and can be copied with such perfection in the modern age is that we set ourselves up to be poisoned, pulling our ideas from polluted rivers of knowledge that are being dumped into with every crank, weirdo, and brilliant but misunderstood genius in the known world. If you’ve ever done a web search on a fact that you know is wrong and watched the hundreds of hits come up with newspapers, websites and forum messages declaring the untrue to be true, you know what I’m talking about. Personally, I can live with this situation, very comfortably, but it requires constant awareness, constant skepticism, and some amount of heartfelt belief and faith that there might be a germ of truth in something completely wild.

This situation is never going to go away now, just like the situation of markets never went away after we invented money. It’s just here, a part of us, a part that connects us all.

Even if the part is deluded and nuts.

Update: Bob Shannon and I have been in pretty intense e-mail conversation in the week since this entry was written. Here’s the outcome and the ongoing situation of that.

In the future, I’m hoping to work with Bob to write a nice summary/interview of his BBS work and life, and make it available. Until then, rest easy: Bob Shannon is a fine fellow.

3 Comments

This essay is going to make a bizzare sort of logic, but not the kind of logic most people like in an essay. Sorry about that; this is how my brain works.

The catalyst for this comes from two different articles, one about Interactive Fiction and one about Filmmaking. Since I happen to be making a film that includes Interactive Fiction as one of its subjects, this combination holds strong interest to me. But there’s a third catalyst, which is the articles themselves.

First of all, it is important to know of an extension/add-on for browsers called BugMeNot. This extension removes the foolish “web registration” that these newspaper websites implement to make you get the chance to see their advertisements with add-on “news” articles jammed between them. I just mention this so that if you haven’t heard of this opportunity before, you’ll know and I won’t feel bad about directing you to these articles.

The first article is about interactive fiction, and is from the Wall Street Journal: Keeping a Genre Alive.

The second article is about small-time filmmakers, and is from the New York Times: Join a Revolution. Make Movies. Go Broke.

If you are reading this essay a few weeks from when it was written, I apologize in advance for the fact that both these news organizations will attempt to charge you for viewing these articles, and you will not be able to see the words for yourself. I stress that it is not worth the money to pay to see them.

The human spirit has many failings (and triumphs), and one of them is that it generally doesn’t keep remembering invisible processes or forces, even when shown, at one point or another, these variables at work. It’s just our way; even if we know that the kitchen of the local restaurant or fast food establishment isn’t all that well maintained, it is very hard to not let that knowledge fade and go back to thinking of it all as a magic clean machine that goes poof and makes our burgers out of dreams. Make no mistake, many folks do in fact accomplish remembering these facts, but it is an effort, an actual effort to keep this information in the forefront of our minds.

At least with foods and goods, you have a tangible resultant product that you can impart process onto, and know that it might come from unclean, amateurish, or problematic sources. Not so with information, and not so with a related line of manufacturing I call experience products.

Experience products are products where, after you use them, there’s nothing left. With, say, a hammer, you pay for the hammer, use the hammer and bing, you have a hammer and a hammered thing. With things such as circuses, funhouses, concerts, movies, television shows, and fireworks, at the end you have nothing. Technically, you have had the experience, but that whole input goes into a pile of meat and quickly fades for most of us.

Newspapers are an exception, mostly because they’re printed on paper, and that paper has other uses, besides allowing us to clip special articles or other sections and keep them. So you get a tangible thing with the product, and some of it is even related to the newspaper’s original goal, which is to provide news.

Except that’s really not the goal of newspapers. That’s not the goal of movie theatres, that’s not the goal of television.

The goal of any profession is to make money. Otherwise it’s not a profession, it’s a charity or a time-killer. Sometimes people running time-killers want to convince themselves they’re a profession, but if you’re paying out more money than you’re bringing in, then you are going to run out of money and stop what you’re doing, and you’ve finished killing time. Newspapers, Movies and Television are professions.

One way that people “hack” the idea of a profession being entirely capital-geared is to encourage the ideals of honesty, clarity and accuracy in their product, whether by hiring people with a reputation for such virtues or by, well.. lying that they have such virtues. This product claim will gain you a certain customer base and you will sustain your business. Similarly, you can also espouse complete and total unreality, complete lack of syncopation with truth, and just going for the easy sex-and-violence sell. And there’s nothing wrong with this, as long as all involved parties, creator and audience, know this is the case.

The issues arrive when the lines are blurred, or one way of thinking tries to pull in the audience of the other way of thinking, to double the audience. And this works both ways: people researching truthful and accurate stories will pepper in the words and phrases of fiction writers, and fiction writers will put forward the idea that their made-up works have a germ of truth at the bottom. This is done to sell you their product.

The experience products used to have a number of advantages on their side: Things couldn’t easily be recorded or reproduced. Tough questions about accuracy, meaning or truth were not always followed up because the products were ethereal. And most importantly, questions about what exactly the product being sold consisted of, were shelved because it was all theoretical crap, and that gets in the way of cooking the books.

Since doing a movie or creating a TV show or making a newspaper was an expensive, expensive proposition, a lot of tough questions were never in need of being answered by experience producers: What, exactly was being sold? What rules were implied by interacting with these products? What level of “quality” has to be applied to these experiences? Since in most cases the answer was “It’s all we have on the menu, so eat it”, critical media analysis was mostly the realm of academics and people who were very, very lonely.

What, exactly, are you paying for when you go to a movie theatre? Is it the quality of the experience (the excellent sound system, the good seats, the nice sound buffering on all sides, the massive screen)? Is it the right to a single viewing of the film being shown at a time agreed upon by both parties? Or are you putting forward a small fee to make that experience a part of your life, forever, including being able to recount or experience it at will, when you so choose?

Obviously the last one isn’t likely to be the case, but so too, it’s not entirely clear which of the other two, or other possibilities, you’re paying for. And more importantly, until recently, nobody gave a shit what the answer was.

OK, so now we’re in some very strange place, and you, as reader, say Well, this is just great, Jason. Where are we, what does this have to do with the titles, what’s with all the high-stepping language, and how do we get out?

So let’s work our way back up.

The aforementioned Wall Street Journal article, Keeping a Genre Alive, is ostensibly a helpful insight into the current Interactive Fiction “Scene”. However, it is, at best, a scratched lens: scratched by the financial requirements of the Wall Street Journal, scratched by the author’s lack of knowledge of the genre, and scratched by the need to present “story” and “interest” where there might be none.

I know that everyone in the article quoted spoke to the author for at least a half-hour over the phone. (In-person interviews almost never happen in the modern world.) I know that when she says “Online Chat Room”, she means IFmud, a MUD dedicated to the authors and players of modern interactive fiction, as well as other social interests. And I know that the reporter, Vauhini Vara, has written articles about mobile phone applications, fake marketing weblogs, and general “blogger” pieces. I will surmise that Vauhini spends some amount of time trying to find the “thing” that will result in a sold piece to the Wall Street Journal. And I also see that Vauhini was writing for the Stanford Daily Journal as late as 2004, which means they’ve been a full professional journalist for a whole year.

How much any non-industry person wants to know about the process of becoming a modern “reporter”, what that skillset consists of, and what sort of comprimises and short-cuts must be taken to achieve a regular output of stories with headlines gripping enough to make people glance at them after seeing the ad next to them… I’ll assume not many. But the point I get across here is there’s not some clean-room machine shooting out these stories, and looking to a newspaper article like this, with its short little word length, its constant framing of interactive fiction authors as compared to “modern” concepts like Grand Theft Auto and the 1992-era “Doom”, and the general painting of the whole sub-culture with a firm “loneliness” brush.. there’s “accuracy” and “truth” in there, but it is framed in fiction and construct to present them.

Germs of truth are buried in there, but what else of the hours of interviews were deemed not of use by the author? How many minutes after they hit “send” on their e-mailing in of the story did they consider the roots of Interactive Fiction and the meaning? What else did a 48-year-old Steve Meretzky say about an art form that he helped define, that is now going to be lost to time? This information is gone and only the bright shiny “look at this strange little thing” bauble of text remains.

I don’t pretend to not have the same conceits with the BBS Documentary, either; but this is why I’m uploading the full interviews as fast as I can, when time permits. People talk about a LOT of other stuff besides BBSes, and in fact talk a LOT about stuff INVOLVING BBSes that simply didn’t make it into the main product. It’s very valuable stuff, I think. And I’m intentionally giving it away. If you question a quote in my film, go find the original interview and hear it in context, where we were going in the interview that made them say what they did, and what amount of what they said ended up being used. It’s pretty important, I think, to make that stuff available.

And how can I make this stuff available? Because information storage, transfer, and analysis has become cheap. Astoundingly cheap. Absolutely, entirely, astoundingly cheap. A 30 gigabyte drive in the year 2000 cost about $200-$300 (Roughly). I just bought two 300 gigabyte drives for $130 apiece for my desktop system.

Let’s go there again. 600 gigabytes (550 effective) for $260. Ten times what it was 5 years ago. This sort of advancement is not slowing down, either.

All across the board, advancement happens. Televisions and sound systems that will give you roughly-equivalent experiences to most crappy multiplexes cost less than $2000. DVDs, stop-gap storage that they are, can be duplicated for rather low cost, and can then be played in a wide variety of cheap DVD players and computer laptops.

Which brings us to the second article, from two directions.

First of all, we have to step back, and harken to what I said about the Scratched Lens. When I read this story, I get really cranky. I don’t like the attitude of the subjects, I don’t like what they say, and I don’t like the overall tone of the article… but maybe I’m not supposed to. This article was written by Charles Lyons to sell the article, and was then further modified to fit in the needs of the New York Times, and a set of editors and a publisher. That is, who knows what germs of truth are in that article and what is just being hyped up for the sake of easy attention of readership (The headline alone shows this, mentioning “revolution” and the scary phrase “Go Broke”). Even as I know this, put it at the forefront of my mind that I am reading an informational product that is being sold to me, I still am affected by it. Yes, I know this whole paragraph can be summarized as don’t believe everything you read. But don’t we anyway? Don’t we end up thinking there must be some truth to the rumors, the insinuations, the wild characterizations? Don’t we let the fiction of the information created by writers still guide us as if we’re experiencing reality?

Keeping that in mind…

The second way I come at this is the content itself, which discusses how there’s a “glut” of filmmakers trying to get into Sundance and other film festivals, hoping, praying they’ll get a “distribution deal” so the whole making of the film is “worth it”. The article goes so far as to quote Arin Crumley, a 24-year old filmmaker who has sunk tens of thousands of dollars into his film and joining the festival circuit:

“If the result was going to be this,” Mr. Crumley mused, “a film with no distributor, no way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it beyond those who saw it at a few festivals, would I have done it? That’s a tough question to answer.” Ms. Buice added: “The answer is, ‘no,’ it’s not O.K. for our film to have been mildly successful on the festival circuit. But otherwise, it was just a jaunt into the abyss and now we have financial hell to pay.”

It is maddening to me to read this, to see yet another set of filmmakers who have been handed these great opportunities in film equipment (cheap cameras) editing (cheap software) and DVDs/Internet Files (cheap product), all 21st-century advances and situations…. and then fall back down into the 1940s era distribution channels as a savior and logical end to their work!

I don’t think people understand exactly what a distribution network is. Unless there’s some amount of vertical integration (stores owned by the distributors or the movie studios owning everything), a distributor, by itself, is just a simple network. It is a list of phone numbers and addresses controlled by a company that issues out funds for product, gets this product to either the final destination or other distributors, maintains the product’s “presence”, and does its fucking damndest to soccer-cleat the face of anyone who gets in their way. That’s what a distributor is.

This is the hidden layer between Chevy Chase smiling into a Zeiss lens and you chawing down jujubees watching him in Bosnian Vacation. It’s the layer where if you are a theatre, this sad little box that sells soda and snacks, you are told what you can and can’t show, which “complete dogs” you have to show in theatre 5 so that you get the “guaranteed winner” in theatre 2.

It’s the layer where if you step out of line, refuse to buy, play little games of quality, meaning or all the happy-go-fruity ideals of moviemaking, you end up with one thing: broken fingers.

It used to be literally. Now it’s mostly figuratively, as the real involved crime has moved up the chain and to other, more lucrative sectors of the economic arena. But it’s still there, the layer of broken fingers that built these distribution chains, these little magic lists of producer and end-buyer, and kept them in line. It is dismal, depressing and it is absolutely real.

I threw a few bucks at the “festival” circuit; about $200. This is about what I paid for a vinyl poster of my DVD’s logo. I consider it the equivalent of throwing down a couple 20s on red at the roulette table. Hey, you never know… but I could walk away from the $200 in a heartbeat, no regrets, no tears, and I did.

We’re in a very great time in history; the creators of experience products first grabbed the crack-pipe of easy creation of media, simple DVDs and CDs that could sell previously-etherial works and make them easily reproducable, forever. And then, when they’d totally bought in and they were utterly, absolutely addicted to this new revenue stream, they’ve made a horrifying discovery: anyone can do this. They can do it with the Hollywood films, the CDs, the DVDs, the TV-Shows, and they can do it at an astounding speed. If someone takes your “experience” and puts up a not-equivalent-but-totally passable version of it as a DiVX file, it can be around the world a thousand times before you finish your Coco Puffs. They are on the run, they are terrified, and the broken-fingers layer is shattering like so much action-film flying glass.

Oh, and while they now try to pass laws to protect themselves and their experience products, laws that would have turned decent minds to goo a mere 20 years ago…. this new distribution works for completely non-pirated works too. You might have heard of these… we call them original stuff. The word “independent” has no meaning in this context; “independent”‘s just another marketing word sucked up by people who don’t spend a lot of time thinking between coke lines. No, I mean original works, like you grabbed your camera, went out with a bunch of your friends, and you told a story about a bunch of friends. And it was good. Before you can say “yo ho ho and a bottle of bittorrent”, your film can be in more places than the original prints of Casablanca could have dreamed of touching. Overnight. Right now. No film festivals. No sucking down bad cocktail weiners. No showing up and begging the same 12 people to sit in your expensively-rented suite and blow smoke up your donut. Right Now.

In the article, people throw tens of thousands of dollars after the ideas of festivals and then cry out how they’ve ruined themselves because their works didn’t catch fire. Remember what I said about “professionals” versus “time-killers”? These are time-killers, exhibit A. If you are dumping not only your spare cash but actual, can’t-ever-get-it-back savings into your film, you have made some serious fundamental errors, some basic miscalculations about your life. And you are insane, the bad insane with the missing shoe and the newspaper hat to protect you from UFO radiation.

Why, when almost all of it can be avoided, would anyone chase after such a worthless illusion as the “cinema” in trying to get their works out there? Why would they want to wrestle with the arcane bullshit, the lame rules, the absolute last-decade-before-last outlook that the vast majority of these places have to indulge because they’re so locked into distribution?

Fuck that. Get out of the darkness. Get into the light. Stop whining. Start shooting.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

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In case some of you are wondering, I am in fact adding new BBS Documentary raw footage to archive.org. It just takes a little time because I have to go over the recorded hour, make sure there’s nothing too actionable or problematic in the footage (for the interviewee’s protection, and mine), and then generate the MPEG file (which clocks in around 2 gigabytes) and upload it to archive.org, which then has to go through the footage and “derive” a bunch of versions of it.

So it just takes a while. I really can’t be doing a whole lot else while going over the footage, because I’ll end up missing something. So it’s not always easy to set aside the time.

Anyway, here’s a few more hours of footage. Some are called “Open Source Movies” instead of “BBS Documentary Interviews”, which is a little kink in the archive.org system, which will be fixed.

http://www.archive.org/details/20040229-bbs-lcrumbling
http://www.archive.org/details/20040128-bbs-willing
http://www.archive.org/details/20040229-bbs-schinnell
http://www.archive.org/details/1993-bbs-tbbstape

The last one is especially cool; it’s a rare introduction-to-TBBS tape created by the developers to show how to get the most out of the TBBS system. I used a portion of it for the beginning of the Make It Pay episode of the BBS Documentary. This is just the sort of stuff I’m delighted to save and get out there.

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I’m often asked about other possible subjects a film-savvy technical historian guy might cover. I get a good amount of mail and conversation with this question, and the suggestions generally fall into a bunch of what-you-might-expect standards.

One which people ask me a lot about is, “Why don’t you do a documentary about virus writers and anti-virus companies?”

Here’s the answer in one short, sweet, completely accurate line: Because I do not want to be killed.

I just wanted to pass that along.

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Back in October 2004, I wrote a review of the Last Starfighter musical, raving about how much I enjoyed it. My positive review, coupled with others, opened doors for those guys. They wrote me and thanked me and sent me a copy of the soundtrack they’d recorded as a demo, a precious gift.

Well, they’ve now got a record contract, and the soundtrack is now re-recorded and released as a full professional album! The Kritzerland label has signed them up, and you can now buy the CD from them.

I’d listened to the demo for so long, that I notice how much they’ve enriched the layers of sound and recording, and how the actors have worked their skills with their performance even further. That’s great.

Oh, and did I mention the liner notes mention slashdot, the Sci-fi channel…. and me? I get thanked for my positive review! Kick ass. It pays to run a weblog.

Well, you know, payment in “cool dollars”.

The CD is great. Listen, and buy 5. It’s a holiday gift to remember.

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As promised, I went out and rented a U-Matic tape deck. One day, $100. I hooked it up through my DV-deck (this converts it over to a digital stream) and then dropped it onto a hard drive. Total time to transfer all thirteen 20-minute tapes: about 5 hours. Total space: 52 gigabytes.

Of course I first digitized the cafe scene, which had me in it, just to see how different I look. The answer: just a bit. I had larger glasses and was of course more scrawny, but you can tell it’s me:

The main actor is Tim Buntel, who was a superstar actor in his final year at Emerson College, and the veteran of a ton of productions, even at that young age. I’d worked with him on a number of plays at Emerson, and he was always my top choice. He always could strike the best poses, even when given very little direction:

The other two main actors are David Klotz and Marichelle Inonog. As I have not transferred the 16 millimeter film to video yet, there aren’t any good shots of them, currently. They make an appearance in some of the scenes, as flickery images on a film bench, but they’ll look a lot better than this:

Some of the shots are truly beautiful, even 14 years later, and even through a couple generations ago of video equipment (most of what I used what relatively old even by 1991-1992 standards). I credit this beauty to the heavy influence of Scott Rosann, my producer, co-writer, and honestly, co-director:

And the production is absolutely caked with friends, acquaintances, girlfriends (none of my own) and buddies of buddies. Notable in the first photo is myself, and then the second sysop of the Works BBS, Dave Ferret. Looking at these photos is like looking at a yearbook for me.

Here’s my film mentor, film teacher Pete Chvany (you’ll see his name mentioned in the thanks in the BBS Documentary packaging), my co-MUSH-wizard Rich, and Mr. Rosann himself, playing the part of a student.

This link will take you to the full gallery of digitized video. There’s also a bunch of 16mm footage that hasn’t been converted, as well as audio tape to go with the 16mm. That’s where all the rest of the film is hiding (it’s probably another 15-20 minutes, I’ll bet).

The digitization took place across a laptop, leaving my main machine free, and leaving me to do a little idle checking up on the various cast and crew members in this film. Tim Buntel was an easy find, which I did a long time ago: he’s employed by Macromedia and is a ColdFusion engineer and expert. To my surprise, David Klotz is the co-leader of a band named “Fonda” that has done very well for itself. Mike D’Alonzo (who is in the audience shot) is a big name in improvisational comedy in Austin, Texas. The rest will take some effort to find, unless they look for their names online. Then we’re all set.

The name “David Linton” hadn’t hit my head since the time of filming; he was the amazingly talented Cinematographer who shot all my 16mm film with me. I can’t find his name out there where I’d want it to be: next to Scorcese and Spielberg. I hope he’s doing well. I hope they’re all doing well.

Either way, they’re all about to get quite a shock. It’s fun to pull back and get one’s own history in shape.

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