ASCII by Jason Scott

Well, it’s amazing what a difference a day or two can make. On the weekend I was jamming through hundreds of packages, preparing my project to go out into the world. I mailed them out on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and some more today.

(By the way, all US autographed copies are out, internationals are about to go out, multi-packs of DVDs that were ordered are going out.)

By yesterday, DVDs that I mailed out Sunday had started to arrive in people’s homes. Some likely smiled and shoved the box on the to-do pile, while others started watching, and mailing me.

Only a few have really mailed me so far; I think there’s a lot to digest and there’s a ton to watch, so naturally folks are just trying to get through the DVDs as best they can. The general consensus seems to be pleasant surprise that it flows well, and delight that it’s done.

All well and good, a pleasant start to the shipping of the documentary.

And then I got slashdotted.

Slashdotting has happened to me a half dozen times or more over the past few years; it has definitely reduced its pure crashing stampede of power, but it is still very, very breathtaking to watch that jump in interest. As it was, I had spent a long time with the websites preparing them for just such a contingency, with the use of a hosting provider named dreamhost who handled the load just fine.

In a slashdot story, comments are rated by moderators from -1 to 5, with -1 basically meaning “troll or off-topic”. Whenever I read those stories that mention me, I always make a point of going right down to the bare metal, the full “show me the whole box” approach. You get a real insight into the dark reaches of the human mind if you do so. You also get all those immediate emotional responses that come from people who have ripped away any sense of decency or politeness. Sometimes (just sometimes), it’s good to hear these things.

One of the messages bothered me because it was character assassination claiming I’d posted the story of my documentary under another name to “astroturf”, along with a nice additional hulk of opinion about my egomaniac personality and dominance of conversations. You go, girl. I refuted the “I posted it” part (it was a gentleman named abcbooze, who contacted me after the posting to apologize if it brought too much traffic) but you really can’t refute the egomaniac part; I like me, I’m my biggest fan, I hang out with myself all the time.

The rest of the messages that weren’t of a nostalgic nature (that is, actually directed at the documentary itself) fell into three general camps: Holy crap it’s fifty bucks, Holy Crap it’s five and a half hours long, where can I download it for free.

I answered these general concerns as best I could in one or two messages, because otherwise you’re running around playing whack-a-mole. At some point, maybe I’ll write essays on the thinking behind all these choices I made, since that would be fun. But not now.

See, the slashdotting caused a Boing-Boinging, which is a little smaller but still very significant, and a very interesting set of people read boingboing; I was also a guest columnist on that site for a while, before they got out of that habit.

And the Slashdotting and the BoingBoinging caused a lot of orders.

A lot.

Of orders.

Enough, in fact, that the DVD pressing is now paid for.

That’s a lot of orders.

And more are coming by the hour; people are hearing about the project, spreading the word, reading about it and making decisions to buy a copy, and I appreciate that very, very much.

This is a digital age, one I have taken advantage of by shooting this on digital video, editing off a hard drive, distributing with a DVD medium that is digital, and including a box that was designed in a computer. This is all great and convenient and good, but it also means that for some people, downloading a copy is the same as owning it by buying it from me.

I won’t go too much into this rather dreary “please pay for it” stuff because when I read it from the other side, as a customer, it turns me off. I don’t see how it wouldn’t do the same for others.

The entire documentary is Creative Commons Attribute Sharealike 2.0 Licensed. This means a lot of things, but basically is means that when you buy a copy, you can do whatever you want with it. An awful lot. And whatever you do or make with it, you have to also allow your creation to be the same way. Why did I do this? Because treating my customers/audience like moronic criminals is not what intelligent beings do. I am not a company, I am a person. When I see creators wave their little flaming sword of copyright at people, poking their own audience in the side with it, it’s a breathtaking level of lame. I do not wish to be lame.

What I am saying, in other words, is that not only have I made it easy to copy the documentary, I’ve made it something I’m basically encouraging with the license. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to sell the copies I am having shipped to my home and mailing out, obviously, but on the other side, in the long run, I would rather people watched these documentaries than have me chasing down children and running through their piggy banks for dimes because they learned about Fidonet.

At some point, I’ll go into the full meaning of what I’ve done with this licensing, because I think it’s important. But not today.

No, today, I had to call the DVD plant and tell them, before the truckload (and it is a truckload) of BBS Documentary boxes were sent out via freight, to send me ANOTHER few hundred copies via two-day air. They should be arriving on Friday, and all these new orders will be immediately filled. I do NOT want people waiting for these if I can help it.

At worst, people who order for a few days next week might have to wait a week for their DVD, which I think is the edge of tolerance. After the truck arrives, of course, I will be literally buried in these things, thousands of them. I promise to get a picture of that. And at that point, ordering a copy gets that copy shipped out that day. And ever onward.

So it has been a very lucrative day for me, and I guess this is the beginning of “the payoff”, where 4 years of work come back to wash over me.

I just wonder what sort of flotsam is going to come with it.

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Here’s my entry in the IMDB. I actually gave them a metric ton more detail than that; their FAQ explains that the way the database works, it first has to register as a new title, and then all the rest of my entries/information are then populated in over the next couple of weeks. So, basically, don’t worry; that thing will be loaded.

I’m going to have a lot of fun with that. Ward Christensen will be in the IMDB! And oh yeah, me too.

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A bunch more went out today with my local post office, who officially hate me. In the future, I’ll be using the nice online postage facility so that I just drop the boxes off in a bin for delivery, but for now it’s pretty much a big manual operation and eyes widen in the line when people come in and I’m carrying 30 boxes.

Still going through the piles of names left as fast as I can. Some people are likely to be receiving their DVD sets today. Hurrah!

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A lot of people have been getting their day-to-day news about this production and all this DVD stuff from this weblog; I’m sure the 2+ day news blackout has been painful. Let me let you know how it’s all going.

First of all, the vast majority of the DVDs have shipped! Hundreds went out on Sunday, and another hundred went out today. I will post conclusively when every last single pre-order is out the door, but I’m expecting most of them to be done within the day.

The remaining orders are:

Autographed copies (because there’s an additional packing step)
Orders of more than 1 (special boxes)
Foreign/Overseas orders (forms, forms, forms)

Assembling the final packages was a lot of work; even though I’d assembled everything as far as I could previously, the last disk required not making the slipcovers and putting the case in until just before packing. This was an enormous amount of time required to put these together, but it does mean that people will be getting their DVDs up to a week before they would have if I’d just waited for the truck to come with the pre-assembled pieces.

I spent basically all Friday and Saturday packing all these boxes, verifying addresses, getting things sorted, and generally preparing for the onslaught of mail. The dining room was used for assembling the packages, and then the kitchen became the shipping depot, with stacks of packaged, labelled DVDs ready to go:

There is a post office in Boston that is open 24 hours and is staffed on Sundays, and so I showed up with my many, many boxes and gave them big, soulful eyes. They lent me a mailing cart and with the help of my friend Charlie, we sent out a car-load’s worth of these things:

Surprisingly, the post office took this guy showing up with an insane amount of boxes in stride, and the two nice ladies who were manning the desk initiated a two-part load-balanced stamping operation, which slammed through the stuff in about 15 minutes:

Finally, here I am with the reciepts for an enormous amount of mailed-out packages:

Quite a trip. Like I said, another bunch went out today, more go out tomorrow, and the “odd” pre-orders (multiples and other issues) are going out around this time as well. It turns out I have to fill out an enormous amount of forms for shipping overseas, and this will delay people, but not by much and I expect to have the whole thing cleared this week.

It was definitely worth all the effort, because some of you have waited seven months, and a week makes a difference; be aware, if you get a box for your pre-order, the director assembled, packed and shipped it himself.

I suspect one or two of you got two copies for the price of one. Congratulations.

Then begins the inevitable fun of returned/misaddressed packages, bounced checks, chargebacks, and all the rest of the fun that comes with mailing out “stuff” into the world at large. Oh, and the reviews. Did I mention the reviews!

Stay tuned.

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A box of DVD 1 arrived. I tested it, it worked. I am typing this with rubber gloves, because I have to get back to the table and assemble. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the late shipping at the post office tonight, but I’ll try.

We are real.

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We’re getting very close to The Moment; which is when we go from where this Documentary is an idea, a dream, a concept, to where it is a product and I am a seller. In that way, we cleave its existence into two pieces.

In the time up to now, when there will be products in my home to go out to people who buy them (and I have to say, Buy! Buy! Buy!), there was no documentary. I had no films I could point to having done, no previous works I could show beyond websites and speeches, and only photo albums and related material from the production to show I was real.

In the beginning was Andrew Mudd. The Mudd Man dates back to about five years ago, to an ill-fated idea I had where I was going to sell textfiles.com t-shirts. I decided that this would cause me legal and other issues, so I decided against it. Andrew, however, had already sent me money for it. In fact, I had his money and put it into a folder and promptly forgot about it. He was the only guy who did so.

Eventually, I started work on the documentary, in June of 2001. (It really has been that long.) And I found Andrew’s money, and contacted him, and he said “Hey, just put it towards the documentary.” So here, five years later, he finally gets something for the cash he put in. So Andrew’s got everyone beat.

Then come the people who, when I started work on the production and there was no idea if it would even be affordable, much less a sellable concern, donated money. Just flat sent me cash on the theory that the textfiles.com guy would probably make something pretty good with a camera. They gave me money ranging from $1 to $111. They all get copies, regardless of what they paid, and everyone over $50 gets two. The $111 guy gets three. So there’s an incentive to donate; people who sent me $5 get a $50 documentary, including free shipping. But they also sent me money 3 years ago.

Then we get to the pre-orders, people who have been sending me money since October of 2004, a full seven months ago, who bought copies of the documentary, again, sight unseen. Based on what, if you look at it that way, constitutes a prospectus, a huge “to be determined”. So that is a very special amount of trust right there.

Some people have known me for years. Some people never knew me except by my work on textfiles.com, and some people didn’t even know that. So that’s a lot of trust to be working under, and don’t think I don’t know and appreciate it.

From this point on, things change, of course. It WAS people who were willing to walk around scaffolding to see what was going to be and drop some cash, and now it’ll be people who see the neon sign and stop in for a drink. What was a guy’s little project is now a company’s product. The company is the same guy from the little project (I have not sold this documentary to somebody), but still, it’s a company.

When people order, there will be a stock of this product in-house (literally) that then gets shipped to them. I will be pushing and promoting this project throughout 2005 and into 2006. I will be talking about it in varying tones, based on audience and venue, and I will be likely engaged in debates and discussions. I will be speaking from some position of authority, having spoken to many of the pioneers of BBSes and the people who moved and shook BBSes throughout the arc of its existence (an arc that has not ended). In other words, I am a published documentarian/historian with a product to sell and a history to discuss and otherwise be involved in.

But before today, I was not that; I was just a guy. And everyone who believed enough in that guy to give him your hard-earned money in the hope he would do good, I would like to thank, one more time.

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From my printer:

Hey Jason – It looks like the Disc 1’s had some `stamper’ issues and have now been re-scheduled to ship 5/19 – which means you would receive your 500 then on 5/20.

We will keep you posted.

So there we go, a one-day delay. Meanwhile, the dining room is now set up like a war room, with all the stuff ready to go, just waiting for The Word.

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Wow, that’s one way to spend an evening. Be rest assured; if you pre-ordered or ordered a DVD set before this very moment, you will be receiving a copy of the BBS Documentary that was hand-assembled by the director. Wearing rubber gloves, so no lifting fingerprints.

It brought me back to my days as a temp worker, being given an insanely easy thing to do hundreds of times, making it slightly less easy.

Ideally, Disc #1 shows up tomorrow and these suckers start going out. So, barring ANOTHER delay, a bunch of people will have a very nostalgic weekend coming up.

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This arrived today:

So here’s the best part. Only discs 2 and 3 arrived. Disc 1 is supposed to arrive tomorrow. It’s like Zeno’s Paradox, except with DVDs. As was explained to me by my friendly printing elves, the duplication of the three discs are three separate projects, and the assembly is a fourth. I have been sent the outcome of the first two, and hopefully the third is on its way, and then it’s a race; can Jason assemble and mail these out before the truck arrives with unbelievable amounts of discs?

It’s not like there’s not a lot to do, since I have to be assembling the packages, putting the labels on the boxes, and so on. It’s just really insane that there’s that one annoying step.

They look great, though, hard to argue with that.

So, I didn’t call the people who asked for a call yet because they do NOT get a call until the packages are dropped off at the post office. (In case some of the people reading this are wondering why they didn’t get a call yet).

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So I woke up to the Fedex guy ringing my doorbell and found that he had 11 boxes for me.

9 of them are DVD cases and 2 are slipcovers. Just so we’re all clear, I am still waiting on the actual DVDs to arrive, which is supposed to happen this week.

Goodness, there’s a lot of them. I’m in the process of autographing the copies I said I would autograph, to match them with labels and then wait for the DVDs to show so that I can pop them in and mail these things out.

Unfortunately, some boxes arrived damaged… but luckily, not enough to affect pre-orders. I am working this all out with the shippers, and the reason this happened is because I’ve been monkey-wrenching my printer’s procedures to force a drop shipment of DVDs and cases so I could assemble them myself, faster than their people who are assigned to the job. So they basically sent me a bunch of boxes of boxes in a weird way and Fedex was a tad rough with them, and so now I have to go file a claim with Fedex.

I only bring this up because it’s an interesting insight into “The Process”. I’m sure for people who do this sort of work all day, it’s all part of the job; it’s “oh, this box got dinged, we do procedure X Y Z and we’re back in business.” But of course this is all the first time through for me so I go bugnuts. I actually made the mistake of calling the printers before a time-out period, and I ended up having to call back about an hour later so they could see I was Bruce Banner again.

“The Process” is usually hidden from people because a person with an item to provide wants to make their customer/audience feel like it’s all magic, all going on behind the scenes and you don’t have to worry your nice little head about this headache or that headache. Since I don’t mind my life serving as a warning to others, I’ve tried to be transparent about the whole thing as I’ve gone. I expect to do a post-mortem discussion/essay about what went well and what didn’t, and I hope people use that to some degree in their own projects. Rest assured, “The Process” has a lot of ups and downs and what the list in your head might have as a single item, like “get copies of the DVD” or “send it to the printer”, turns out to be 20 little steps that all require attention before that one single step is really “done”.

So here we are with this special shipment has already filled my dining room with boxes.

I can assure you it is quite surreal to stare down hundreds of copies of your “product”, when that product was nothing but a dream a while earlier, a goal or plan that you had ideas about but nothing more. To go from sitting in my old apartment going “I’m going to make a movie!” to standing near an open box with dozens of “the movie” looking expectantly back… it’s quite a feeling.

And I ordered a lot more than just these. Someone asked me recently if they’d “missed the boat”, that I’d made the same amount of DVDs to match the number of pre-orders and after that, they were “done” and there wouldn’t be any more. Let me be the first to assure everyone… I HAVE PLENTY. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Plenty for everyone. And if I sell out, I will make more.

My goal had always been to tell the story of the BBS as best I could, or, if I hadn’t told some parts as well as people liked, inspire them to improve upon the foundation I’d set up. To that end, after spending years making this mini-series, I intend to do my best to get it to as many people as possible. And if, once you’ve seen this documentary, feel you want to, tell as many people about it as you think can stand the news. I’ll ensure I have copies ready for them.

I am going to spend a lot time talking to folks about this work. I will be speaking to a lot of people in hallways, on stages, on radio and wherever else they’ll let me talk. I expect to have some heated arguments and I know I’ll continue to get the interesting mix of accolades and put-downs I’ve gotten so far.

It’s going to be quite fun to do so. Because this is a solid, sizeable “thing”. At five and a half hours of episodes, I would hope I’d covered an awful lot. There’s a range of emotions and situations and statements and stories in there, far greater than I would have imagined. And now they’re protected for the forseeable future, soon to blossom on screens and laptops around the world. Good stuff.

Update: Amazon repaired my entry so that it no longer wrongly claims these are Region 1 DVDs (they are regionless and copy protection-less). I have to say that Amazon has impressed me with their responsiveness, actions, and ease of use. I thought this was going to be hell incarnate, and it was heaven.

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