ASCII by Jason Scott

One of my disks is acting flaky. All through the production, I’ve had to deal with the inherent lack of quality of IDE disks. I’ve had fifteen (15) die in the past few years. With over 2.5 terabytes of disks in use at any time with the video footage, I’ve just been playing the odds. I keep three copies of the video footage (one of them offline) as insurance, so it’s not bitten me yet. But it’s a bit of a pain when one drive dies to begin to move hundreds of gigabytes around to safer, higher ground. It takes a while, to say the least.

I can therefore focus on writing this news entry to tell you how things are. I am now getting mails on a very regular basis wondering what’s up. People who bought the documentary back in October of 2004 are of course worried about the long delay and the the lack of DVDs arriving in their mail. I feel horrible about this, but at the very least I can console myself that it’s about quality, about getting all the pieces in place into a package worth buying.

I have played various episodes for a number of people, as a final test for some of them; they are very well recieved, and I’m very happy about that. They definitely tell a story and definitely give people a sense of the BBS history that has happened. Now I just want to get them to the world.

My day job heated up, which has caused some unwanted delays, but on the other hand without that job, it wouldn’t have been possible to do the documentary, so it’s kind of get unhappy about it. I’m likely going to have to take some days off of work to nail the rest of the work.

So what’s left? Subtitles, some minor edits on FIDONET and MAKE IT PAY before they’re considered done, and finishing up any other descriptions for the photo album which is included on the DVD-ROM. Over a gigeabyte of photos are in the album; pretty big and intimidating numbers. But they’re all intimidating numbers, I guess.

I also just finished (finally) the formatting hundreds of paragraphs from the pre-orders. For folks coming late, everyone up to about November of 2004 could order the DVD set and give me a paragraph that would go on the DVD. I’ve now taken these writings and put them into a readable format. There will be a plaintext version, and an HTML version to choose from. The stories and paragraphs people wrote are very, very touching.

The Eye of Doom had flu this week and that tripped him up badly. He should be coming back with audiovisual changes for the episodes in his hands. He’ll be getting these other two very soon.

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ARTSCENE is done.

ARTSCENE is the episode dealing with the ANSI Art Scene that rose up in the early 1990’s, which had roots in the 1980’s and decades before that. I mostly tell the story of ACiD (ANSI Creators in Demand) and iCE (Insane Creators Enterprises), who were two of dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Art groups who competed heavily to create artwork for BBSes and beyond for a good number of years.

On a pure technical level, the episode is hellish. It has 14 tracks of audio and video, and takes 21 hours to render on my system. I’d upgrade the system, but that seems like really taking a stupid gamble way too far into the production. There’s a lot of “B-Roll”, which is where the extra tracks are… shots of the artwork, of the writings, and all the rest from the ANSI art scene’s history.

The ANSI art scene, per se, is not in any way “dead”, although the ANSI Art Scene for dial-up BBSes mostly is, which is what the documentary’s about. There are still a good number of ANSI groups creating artwork in that medium and others, and there’s a wide swath of opinion about the documentary from them. This shouldn’t be a surprise; when someone comes along and makes a product, be it film, book or radio show, in which they describe some sort of “scene” or “subculture”, at least two things happen. One set goes “Finally, we are vindicated.”. Another goes “Damn, we are being exploited.” There’s a third set going “Finally, we are being vindicated as we are being exploited.” but these are the folks who are less bothered by it all than inspired to use it to further their subculture. ‘Yeah, like the movie. Now give me server space.”

The Eye of Doom awaits this episode especially. The Eye of Doom’s name, by the way, is Jim Leonard, and he is known to a lot of people as Trixter of Hornet. He was one of the creators of the Mindcandy DVD, which is a collection of computer “demos” from the past 10 years on the PC platform. Believe me, if there is a guy you want on your side when it comes to refining a visual work, it’s Jim. He’s gone over my stuff and pointed out things that a fanatical Kubrick fan wouldn’t notice on the 5th try. He leaves jewelers from Faberge and watchmakers from TAG Heuer gasping for breath from attention to detail. He has already warned me how much attention the Art Scene episode gets, because he feels so close to the material. Keep in mind, of course, that I have final say, so don’t go after Trixter if you don’t like the resulting work.

I would say, however, that the ARTSCENE episode is the most “Accessible”, by which I mean that you could play it for people by itself and they would come away with some knowledge of a neat little subculture and the forces and thoughts within it. So that’s at least something.

There’s no winning, by the way, with a subject like this. People will either think it too short or too long. That’s the nature of going after something that’s pretty darn obscure, even by documentary standards. For myself, I am very pleased to have an episode on it, and I am especially pleased that I got an interview with Ebony Eyes.

Ebony Eyes was everywhere in the BBS world for a while; her artwork was on many, many BBSes and she was really good at what she did. And she could throw out ANSI drawings at a speed that is still breathtaking. It took a lot of effort to convince her that I wasn’t a maniac, and I think I have to give the credit to Rad Man of ACiD, who had been interviewed twice for this episode and who talked to her a lot about it. The interview went very well, and a good part of it shows up in the episode.

There are now two episodes left to finish: FIDONET and MAKE IT PAY. There’s a reason they’re the last ones; they’re quite complicated. I hope to be done with them shortly. Then it’s just a matter of final cleanups before going off to the printer. I’m on schedule… just not the schedule I’d thought it’d be.

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For the short time it was up, torrents.textfiles.com was pretty popular. The idea behind it was good, and still holds: every once in a while, people get really excited and try to download all of textfiles.com. The site is many gigabytes (assuming you go for some of the sub-sites as well) and so this takes a while. Unfortunately, the massive number of small files and the fact that some people use some pretty poorly-working clients to attempt massive parallel transfers of the site means that my bandwidth gets nailed.

Here’s what nailed bandwidth looks like. The blue line is the outgoing, and the green line is the incoming. The reason the blue line is sometimes flat at the top is because they have maxed out the T-1 that TEXTFILES.COM and the related sites run on.

There’s really no need for this to be happening. Sometimes, people are pulling things down and they find the throughput to be less than enjoyable, but that’s life when something’s free; that’s why I’m going to be becoming a non-profit organization this year.

For people who want “THE WHOLE SHEBANG”, a bittorrent connection is the obvious solution. Then everyone who wants multi-gigabyte hits (actually, the main TEXTFILES.COM archive works out to about 700mb) can just grab it that way and help each other along the way.

The thing is… bittorrent seems to have some major issues with the way I want to use it. So I’d like some help.

The way I want to use it, Bittorrent would replace an HTTP link or an FTP link. You would go to torrents.textfiles.com and there would be a set of files offered, where you would grab the torrents and then you download them. I would be the seeder, I would be offering up the new seeds, and you’d choose from them.

Basically, I want torrents.textfiles.com to be almost exactly like LEGALTORRENTS.COM.

The thing about a lot of tracker/bittorrent sites is that they are very simple to use from the user-side. If you have the client installed (and really, it’s on the level of Flash to install a bittorrent client) then you click on the magic torrent link, it asks where you want to dump the file or directory, and “off it goes”. There’s a number of clients of varying usefulness, but they all kick in nicely. The issues are on the server side.

Part of it is the webpage. I like how it shows you statistics of how much has been transferred and how many people are using it. I understand this tends to require PHP, because that’s how many people think now, and that’s OK. I do not think MySQL is OK.

I understand that I have to run a tracker, but I do not understand why trackers are so difficult to deal with in UNIX; they all want to shoot stuff to the screen and I can’t find a way to do an easy tracker startup script. It’s all hopelessly complicated for the relatively easy thing I want done (start a tracker, serving these files).

If someone could help me, I would appreciate it, and textfiles.com would be a better site for it.

Read the rest of this entry »

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As I promised, I would be updating the BBS Documentary site much more frequently, to make up for the production falling behind schedule. Here are the last three updates on that site, put into one location for the people keeping track of the production view syndication feeds and the usual trickery of weblogs.

January 23, 2005

The Eye of Doom has signed off on three of the episodes.

Who or what is the Eye of Doom? A friend of mine going a ways back who has an amazing talent for picking out all the slightest imperfections and oversights that crop up when you’re working on a large-scale project like this documentary. Maybe a boom mike gets into a shot, or a filter is applied poorly, or the framing could be much improved. It takes an intense, detached, involved eye to do so, and he has it, so I call him the Eye of Doom. It’s Doom because of course any major errors he finds means lots of work for me, but better now than after the DVDs are pressed and I can do nothing about them.

Every time the Eye asks me about a specific setup, like “Why is this shot like this?” or “Why do you cut from here to here?”, I can often reply with a paragraph or two, specifically about this choice. This is a sign, perhaps, that I’ve spent a whole heck of a lot of time editing.

I kind of wish I could have done some little project before this one, some easy subject with a tiny but clear cast of characters that would have been a few months of work before this insane monolith of a project, but there you go. Every task in this project is really darned huge, and very time consuming. Just subtitles have been a big deal, not to mention the commentary tracks, or really, even the selection of music for the soundtracks. Big, I tell you.

Mostly, I am fixing up sound. Sound has turned out to be the big deal with this project; with interviews conducted in hallways, computer rooms, conventions, outside, and even an in-use band rehearsal space, we have a lot of background noise on some of these tapes. I’ve been able to remove a lot of it, but it takes time. There’s also some wide variances in how various people spoke, so I’m working with that as well. This is a case where I made a specific choice and trade-off a few years ago; I chose to do the travelling alone, instead of with a crew, because I knew that I would kill a crew or lose some good friends to take the trips I took. So with just me alone, there’s only myself to look through the lens, consider the shot, set up the sound and take readings, and then conduct the interview. During the interview, I check the tape, check the lights, make sure the camera is still running, verify the framing, and, oh yeah, ask a series of questions both from my own notes and based on the anwsers the person was giving at the time. To be honest, I should be happy the whole production isn’t shot upside and backwards in black and white.

At some point I will discuss my thoughts on the copying and peer-to-peering that will happen with this project, but not today. After my stuff is out, I’ll likely write up a few thoughts about it.

The Eye of Doom is now viewing the bonus footage. I can’t wait.

January 28, 2005

Another episode is basically finished, HPAC. It goes to the Eye of Doom on Monday, along with whatever else I finish. I haven’t been working exclusively on HPAC this last 5 days; it just happens to be the final pieces clicked into shape with it first. I hope for a couple more to follow over the weekend so I can send the EoD three episodes again. Eye of Doom wants Eye Candy.

I’m very proud of HPAC. I knew I would have to have some amount of coverage of “Underground” BBSes and the whole hacker situation, but I didn’t want it to be another rotten swipe at the subculture. We have quite enough of those as it is.

Basically, I try to cover Hacking, Phreaking, Anarchy and Cracking in a general manner as applies to bulletin boards. (There’s also a big sequence about Handles). In terms of cracking, I mean removing software protection from computer games. It’s quite a piece; very interesting to watch for me, even though I’ve been basically staring at it for months.

I have no idea what to make of it in a larger context of what people will think about it, so that will be interesting as well. Well, onward.

January 29, 2005

Another episode is finished! SYSOPS AND USERS, one of the more involved of the episodes and a personal favorite finally got the treatment of the sound and video mix that I was looking for, and will be leaving for the Eye of Doom along with HPAC. I wonder if I can do three in one weekend?

SYSOPS AND USERS covers what it says: the people who ran BBSes and the people who used them. It’s basically a mass of anecdotes, memories and reactions of being on a BBS. It absolutely makes no attempt to explain what BBSes are and what their context is: that’s what the other episodes are for, especially BAUD. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to make the documentary into a multi-episode collection: this documentary episode does not easily stand on its own if you have no idea what a BBS is, or have much knowledge about them beyond that. It’s lifted up and supported by the episodes around it, and that’s just the way I like it.

It’s actually strange in several ways: it has no background music (too distracting), and no names under who’s speaking. I made these two choices because the cutting is so intense and constant that you end up with this confusing blur of names that are NOT relevant to the episode. I will be using the unique technology of the DVD format to allow people who want to know who’s who to see that; one of the subtitle tracks will be the name of whoever is speaking! So you just click over to that, and then you know. Everyone’s credited at the end, of course.

If I’m called upon to describe it in a more artistic/filmmaker sense, the idea of the SYSOPS AND USERS episode is to have the same general feel of a BBS message base; people posting one after another, commenting, threads popping up, back and forth discussions and disagreements and the rest. On a more realistic sense, it’s basically a lot of interviews cascading down with cool stories about the BBSes.

So that’s two in one day! That’s what I’m talking about.

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The Eye of Doom has signed off on three of the episodes.

Who or what is the Eye of Doom? A friend of mine going a ways back who has an amazing talent for picking out all the slightest imperfections and oversights that crop up when you’re working on a large-scale project like this documentary. Maybe a boom mike gets into a shot, or a filter is applied poorly, or the framing could be much improved. It takes an intense, detached, involved eye to do so, and he has it, so I call him the Eye of Doom. It’s Doom because of course any major errors he finds means lots of work for me, but better now than after the DVDs are pressed and I can do nothing about them.

Every time the Eye asks me about a specific setup, like “Why is this shot like this?” or “Why do you cut from here to here?”, I can often reply with a paragraph or two, specifically about this choice. This is a sign, perhaps, that I’ve spent a whole heck of a lot of time editing.

I kind of wish I could have done some little project before this one, some easy subject with a tiny but clear cast of characters that would have been a few months of work before this insane monolith of a project, but there you go. Every task in this project is really darned huge, and very time consuming. Just subtitles have been a big deal, not to mention the commentary tracks, or really, even the selection of music for the soundtracks. Big, I tell you.

Mostly, I am fixing up sound. Sound has turned out to be the big deal with this
project; with interviews conducted in hallways, computer rooms, conventions, outside, and even an in-use band rehearsal space, we have a lot of background noise on some of these tapes. I’ve been able to remove a lot of it, but it takes time. There’s also some wide variances in how various people spoke, so I’m working with that as well. This is a case where I made a specific choice and trade-off a few years ago; I chose to do the travelling alone, instead of with a crew, because I knew that I would kill a crew or lose some good friends to take the trips I took. So with just me alone, there’s only myself to look through the lens, consider the shot, set up the sound and take readings, and then conduct the interview. During the interview, I check the tape, check the lights, make sure the camera is still running, verify the framing, and, oh yeah, ask a series of questions both from my own notes and based on the anwsers the person was giving at the time. To be honest, I should be happy the whole production isn’t shot upside and backwards in black and white.

At some point I will discuss my thoughts on the copying and peer-to-peering that will happen with this project, but not today. After my stuff is out, I’ll likely write up a few thoughts about it.

The Eye of Doom is now viewing the bonus footage. I can’t wait.

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It’s getting towards the end of the month, isn’t it? Oh dear. Well, it’s not for lack of my working on this project; I am currently clocking something in the range of 10-14 hours a day on it, while keeping a day job. You can imagine what I look like right now.

BAUD got my final once-over and is being rendered to go away for final inspection. Basically, I went through it twice, once for sound, and once for visuals. Nothing was allowed to pass for “next time” because there is no “next time”. It is what it is, and I’m happy with it.

BAUD is the first in the series, so it was very important to me to have it cover its bases well. It goes into the forces that predate the BBS, the story of its beginning, and the story of the people who came after the pioneers and turned BBSes from a cool experiment into an event to be reckoned with. It is where Ward and Randy come forward and get the bow they richly deserve, and where a lot of people who were around for the two beginnings get to give a sense of what it was like.

I say “two beginnings” because the way I frame it, and the way that it felt in researching the story, is that there were two separate but very important sets of “first-timers”: the people who were building kits and making modems work with these kits and who started the BBS, and the kids who begin their childhoods with the purchase of an 8-bit home computer and who turned the BBS into a place to be at, not just a thing to test. So they’re both in this episode. Along the way, we cover a lot of ground, and stop pretty soon in “the big story”. That’s what the other episodes are for, after all.

Each of these episodes has to get this vicious once-over before I consider them done. Some are in much better shape than others. For the record, ARTSCENE has 12 tracks of audio and 8 tracks of video. You can imagine what editing something like that is when trying to tweak sound quality or get scrolling just right. My eyes cross just thinking about it. Most of the episodes are just a small round away from being done.

The subtitle people have been just absolutely astounding. Christian Wirth has jumped in and has transcribed over 4 hours of footage and counting. And the Spanish translation team is working at full bore; every day they send me a translated copy of one or more of the bonus footage clips, with the episodes coming shortly. It’s great to get help there.

This is probably the last time I’ll mention this for a while, but it really is going quickly and well…. just on a shift of a month and a half from where I was expecting it all to be. Otherwise, this is a smooth time. I’ve decided that everyone who pre-orders will get some sort of gift, some trinket to distinguish that they believed in me and bought ahead of time, before everyone knew what the project was. I haven’t decided what that will be yet; I’ll take suggestions.

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Quite a ball has begun rolling in other quarters regarding Wikipedia and various criticisms from various quarters. As it is, I enjoy all the verbiage flying around, and reading the varying complaints and defenses that are going on. I have tried some social experiments with Wikipedia in the last month on and off (the Documentary takes precedence over everything of course), and intend to eventually report on those observations and findings in a future time, when I am not trying to get a major production out the door.

But I did want to step in and lance some of the growing redundant arguments going on in all the commenting I’m seeing posted, since I’m now seeing my essay used for these arguments pro and con and that’s not entirely what I intended.

First of all, Wikipedia has, basically, forked. People have been running copies of Wikipedia that are following different rules for inclusion and exclusion. The problem is what a lot of projects encounter when they fork, which is brand recognition and brand dilution. Right now, Trillian has it set up that you can use Wikipedia to look up terms. That’s a lot of weight placed into Wikipedia, to the detriment of other approaches that are not getting such attention. Until another project achieves critical mass or a big following that gets such high-profile regard, it’s really a one-horse race, and so people are fighting over control of the horse. I think eventually we’ll see a Coke-Pepsi situation, where the now-battling factions that are tearing apart Wikipedia on the inside will spit off into two major approaches with different goals, and that’ll be that. It will be quite ugly, as, really, a lot of Wikipedia’s internal political structures are.

People are defending Wikipedia by downplaying its importance. I am seeing an awful lot of arguments by people responding to criticism about Wikipedia by going “well, duh, it’s just wikipedia”, or “don’t put so much weight on Wikipedia, it is what it is”. I call this an “auto-straw man argument” or a “decoy self-ad hominem attack”, although of course I’m sure the debate world has a more efficient term. Basically, you respond to criticism about your project by demeaning and debasing it yourself, before anyone else could get a chance to, and then stand there with your arms crossed at your swift hari-kiri in a swordfight. It’s a pretty vacuous tactic; obviously Wikipedia is an important project, or so much effort would not be expended on it. And if it’s important enough that people are literally pouring weeks and months of their lives into it, it’s important enough to question basic tenets of how it is functioning. Look around for this argument by fervent Wikipedians. It’s scarily everywhere and should be dismissed.

My primary disagreement with Wikipedia’s approach is not about expertise, accuracy or quality; it is about procedure energy dispersal. The arguments about Wikipedia are being hijacked left and right by indicating this is a battle by the Old Guard against the New Better Way, or that this is a hue and cry by ivory-tower academia trying to prevent a pretender to the Throne of All That Is Good Intellectually. This makes someone who spends a lot of time on Wikipedia feel good about themselves (I’m fighting the Power) but my issues as stated in my previous essay were not about whether Wikipedia was in competition with other reference sources, but how minor procedural decisions have essentially doomed it on its own.

As an off-the-cuff example, Wikipedia has a login system, wherein for free and with no effort, you become a “Person”, an entity with a name and a history and even your nice little page that you can use to build a fun little world of pictures and information about your work on Wikipedia. It is essentially effortless, and it is pretty easy to create a mass of user accounts and foment your opinions in votes and other situations. (This situation is called “sockpuppetry” by active Wikipedians and is a frequent call-out in votes; people who agree with someone they don’t like can be accused of being a “sock puppet” and a meta-battle ensues). But this level of unaccountability isn’t an adequate situation in the current Wikipedia political structure; instead, they allow totally anonymous full-content editing by random users. In other words, no accounting at all. People don’t even have to submit to a rubber-stamp login process to begin screwing with entries that someone may have just spent hours getting just right. How could that second person possibly want to continue to be a part of the process?

This is what I am talking about; pure procedural defects that I think are fatal to Wikipedia’s continued usefulness as a reference material, or even as a repository of information. It is why I will be making no further contributions to it beyond meta-interaction. (My social experimentation has had some neat responses and things I can report on, but I’ve not really been editing anything significant or worthwhile.) Indicating that my essay is about expertise or committes or the rest is kind of missing the point.

What’s the point? A quick list:

There is no barrier to entry to cause wide-spread changes to Wikipedia and this is bad.

Wikipedia allows Votes for Deletion and will, upon one of these votes, erase information that may represent a lot of work and effort, based on shifting and arbitrary standards, and this is bad.

Wikipedia has a large contingency of users who play the Wikipedia Rules of Etiquette and Procedure like they were Role Playing Games and function within them causing havok and personal gratification at the expense of moving the project forward.

Academic review, experts vs. non-experts, use of Wikipedia as a replacement encyclopedia, and other such high-level concerns are way down the road and not my concern; my concern, and ultimately the reason why I have stopped contributing to the project (and why many others have, too) rests in aspects much closer to Wikipedia’s core.

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A pretty valid question, one especially important to the hundreds of folks who have been grand enough to pre-order the documentary, going back to October.

When I first opened the pre-ordering, I indicated that it would be going out for the end of December. In the beginning of December, I realized this was not the case, informed all the orders with valid e-mails, and then shifted to “sometime in January”. As I’m working here, I want to increase the openness of the process so everyone understands what’s going on.

Basically, the project is very nearly complete. The episodes are basically done. I’ve laid out all three DVDs. Even the boxes have come back. Here’s one of the thousands of boxes printed:

Photographs of the Box

There are several reasons why it’s not out to the printers yet. The first is subtitles. I’ve intended to subtitle most of the project, so that people who cannot hear can read everything being said. There’s also a lot of different voices from the hundreds of interviewees, and it makes it much easier to follow. But it also means that I and friends are transcribing episodes, pacing them in a subtitling program, and doing best to make sure they work. This is a ton of work.

Next is refining all the sound and video. There’s quite a few hours of footage, with a lot of variance of sounds, since this was all one guy making the movie. I’ve got it pretty much under control, but there’s still a few spots where people sound too loud or soft, and I have to go through all the footage to fix that.

There’s some issues with having a lawyer looking at some of the footage, mostly based around trademarks appearing on shirts and in backgrounds; most of those are handled.

And finally, there’s rendering in MPEG-2, which takes my machines quite some time (since there’s so many hours).

I’m working very hard on all this, but it really isn’t a marketing trick or other subterfuge; I really am just one guy, and each time I’m doing something, that’s all I’m doing; there’s no team following me up, just a few family members looking for any classic errors or omissions.

The printing company has told me it takes an average of 3 weeks for turnaround on a printing project like mine, which includes a “check disk” phase, where I look at my DVDs back from the shop and run them on a DVD player, to make sure they work well before we make thousands of them. So there’s a big lump of time.

One of the reasons I’ve stopped trying to get this project talked about in other circles is because I want it out and available for people to get in the mail immediately after they order it, and until these things are in my house and ready to be shipped, that’s simply not “ready”. People are still pre-ordering and I appreciate that very, very much, but I am just not doing anything on the promotion side until it’s ready to go.

I’m going as fast as I can, I really, really am. I will likely never do another project like this again, and I want this out the door as right and as good as I can make it. I’ll keep everyone updated in coming days.

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Back in October, I reviewed a performance of The Last Starfighter. It recieved a lot of attention and helped the creators of that musical in terms of recognition and attendance. About a week ago, they sent me a very special gift: a Demo CD of the Last Starfighter Musical, performed by the Original Cast at the show I saw at the Storm Theatre in New York City.

I asked if I could make copies, and they said yes, except that it could not be sold, because of Actor’s Equity rules. It is to function as a demo of the musical (created by Skip Kennon and Fred Landau) and for the people performing it.

In the spirit of that and the holiday season, I am now providing this music to the world. This is going to kill my bandwidth connection, and I hope some kind soul could put up a bittorrent or a mirror to help me.

THE LAST STARFIGHTER, THE MUSICAL (Zipped File Removed)

I hope that this will open doors for the cast, crew, and creators of this musical; information on the production is included in the pack and of course I can be contacted if there are any theatre groups or performers looking to run this musical; I think it’s pretty timeless.

Happy Holidays.

Update: The creators of the musical have signed with a label and their soundtrack is now for sale.

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