ASCII by Jason Scott

It’s nice to think of stuff in theory, speak as if you’re an expert, and then, in practice, have it shown to you why you were dead wrong.

Such as it has been in this, the most top-heavy portion of the documentary, the last 10 percent or so of work. I had thought I was going to update all the time, since that drove me nuts with other documentary sites. Yet, I have not! The reasons for this are not unlike the reasons I’ve given in the last number of updates, which are, all told, “steady as she goes”, with work progressing but no particular amazing events or breakthroughs that really warrant a new news entry.

But honestly, things are coming to a head so I should really talk about stuff in a more concrete manner, for people who are waiting for this to become “real”.

First of all, about 300 people have pre-ordered copies. This means two things: they have stories that will go on the DVD-ROM section of one of the three DVDs in the set, and there are 300 people who believe in my project enough to have dropped money for something not out for a few months. I am still floored and delighted at this, and all those people know, I hope, how appreciative I am about that. Various parties and people in my life were a little concerned that I’d just invested in the most bright and biggest of white elephants with this project, and they are now understanding that there are going to be real, actual people who will want to watch this.

The box art, that is, the slipcover and the 3-DVD box that will house my work, is coming in from the DVD duplication place tomorrow. We already had a round of revisions to it, to make sure the colors and a few other details were right. Here’s a small preview of the art. The top is the slipcover (exploded) and the bottom is the 8-panel DVD case (also exploded). Obviously, the art is not to final scale.

The “Beta Premiere” went well; I was rather nervous about the whole thing, but on the whole people liked the episodes. It was especially worrisome because as it turned out, nearly 20 people who I’d interviewed were there, and got to see themselves. Nobody punched me, which was an excellent sign. And in fact most seemed to be really happy about how the whole thing came out.

A common comment from the daughters, spouses and girlfriends of people who were in it was “finally, I understand what they’ve been talking about”. So I guess it’s a tool to help explain people’s pasts, as well as everything else. It’s also a meditation on being online, an album of concepts long forgotten, and a jumping-off point for months of deeper research. It’s got a lot of uses.

One thing that IS obvious is that I was right to focus this project on DVD; it is a lot of information and only a complete maniac would handle it all in one sitting. It is a massive collection of information and history, and is not a singular epic. Perhaps the project is epic, but it should not be all watched in one setting. Maybe I should make a warning label.

The episodes were originally planned to be seven 1-hour episodes. It looks like, after editing, it will be 8 episodes of sizes ranging from 40-50 minutes, as well as a bunch of bonus footage that is really neat but doesn’t fit into any of the episodes by themselves. (Mostly because the stories take a number of minutes to tell.) So it’s still a metric ton of footage in action, just spread a different way than I expected. I’m really happy with the whole thing.

A team of translators are adding a spanish translation to the subtitles, and pretty much everything in the episodes are being subtitled. So that’s apparently unusual, but I wanted this done right. ‘Doing it Right’ has been the theme, and the reason I’m now rather older than when the project started.

Now, as it is turning out, this will not be ready for Christmas. I mailed everyone who pre-ordered this documentary, and only had one refund, so that’s not so bad. It is 100% a question of quality. I am going over all these episodes and bonus features, shot by shot, making sure everything works, everything’s accurate, everything flows. It’s quite a task.

The goal is to give the finalized DVDs to the plant by Christmas, and then get everything going out in January. I’m going to stick with that and will let everyone know in a timely fashion if this is not the case. But I expect it will be; everything is pretty much together.

What a project! I’m looking forward to never doing anything like this again!

Comments Off on BBS Documentary News (December 12, 2004)

Two issues that are on the forefront of my mind as of late. They are not related, but they are both minor issues in the context of most of my work, so I’m just combining them in one entry so I can be done with them.

TEXTFILES.COM is slow this week. The main reason this time is because the nice folks at planetmirror.com are mirroring not only the roughly 1.5 gigabyte collection that comprises textfiles.com and web.textfiles.com, but also a lot of my larger sites, like audio.textfiles.com and pdf.textfiles.com, which are now getting into the a-lot-of-gigabytes realm and aren’t slowing down.

As discussed perhaps too many times before, I do not accept advertising, and do not put banner ads or other such trickery on my sites. I actually recieve the very occasional sparse criticism for this, but mostly, I get either a spare compliment, or even better, a complete lack of noticing this fact, the way it should be. It’s encouraging because it means people are living their lives, browsing information, not having to notice the lack of advertising. Excellent.

But I do get a lot of complaints the site is slow. Yes, this is true. Slow and free. I made that choice a long time ago, and I am happy to live with it. Someday I’m sure I’ll get something faster than a T-1 line, but the monthly cost falls under “hobby” level as opposed to ‘”sacrifice” level, So I expect it will stay as such. Every once in a while there is a flare-up and the site is particularly slow. This is one of those times, and I thank folks for their patience. Mirrors are important things; I will not always be here, and as my popularity (or at least my site’s popularity) grows, I am trying to expand it without comprimising too many principles.

The other issue is that I have been making a concerted effort to avoiding dabbling in politics. I am not engaged in too much in the way of political criticism and I do not look out among the users of this site or of the world and haplessly cleave everyone into designations and names, then leave them in these bins to rot. I should state emphatically that I favor a set of laws and social mores that allow textfiles.com to continue to exist, but beyond that, I do not see what it solves to have my thoughts added.

But I will say that I have seen a number of my favorite sites, lists, and destinations ruined, absolutely ruined, by derisive and inaccurate name-calling, classification, and a level of perceived teams that rivals professional sports. It has reached the level that I now find it disturbing and troubling, and I am finding less reason to engage myself in many sites or discussions as a result. That’s sad, and ultimately my problem and my problem alone.

Nothing I can say will be effective in imploring people to stop, so to go into too many details would just add to the ball of hate. I will simply say that I will continue to make my best effort to bring what I do to as many people as possible, without attempts to gift-wrap it in my critique of percieved flaws in the world that have no place in the transaction. I love all of you, even the broken ones, and I wouldn’t run these sites if I didn’t.

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As part of the work on the documentary I am going through an awful lot of historical items, trying to find examples of BBSes regarded by media throughout its quarter-century. I’ve been finding some great stuff, but I figured that since the purpose of most modern blogs are to sneer at earnest past/current attempts to control the uncontrollable, I’d add this little tidbit:

Maybe at some point when I’m not spending 13-14 hours a day finishing up a 3 year project, I’ll go into some of the interesting implications of the article and the way of the modern world. But until then, I’ve fulfilled my yearly quota of sneering at the past.

I couldn’t resist checking on how ol’ Maggie’s doing. A quick browse shows she went on to head a number of magazines, such as Computer Life , and possibly a number of other media projects. (I don’t want to imply I can guess which Maggies are the Right Maggies.)

I wonder if Maggie has Kazaa on her desktop.

Comments Off on Everything Old is Scanned Again

I have now tried extended interaction with Wikipedia. I consider it a failure. In doing so, I will describe why, instead of just slinking off into the night on my projects. Maybe it will do some good. Maybe it will not. I’m sure, at the end of the day, there must be hundreds like me at this point. Burned, slapped, ejected from the mothership for not following the rules, no matter how intricate and foolish. Let me at least go with some smoke.

The concept of Wikipedia is a very engaging and exciting one, especially to someone like myself who spends an awful lot of time collecting information and then presenting it to people. Normally, the work I do is the work that’s done. That is, if I don’t give much attention to a specific section of my sites, that section will stay static, even if it’s in need of improvement. This is not very enjoyable. In collaboration, you will put your tools down for the night, and when you wake up the next morning, more work is done. This is very exciting, very enjoyable. It’s why people work in teams in the first place.

Within the social spectrum of information specialists, I am best classifyable as a moody loner. I don’t work well with others, at least, that is, people who I don’t like. Which is a lot of people. As a result, the vast majority of my sites are one-man operations, meaning that the firehose of my concentration goes from one site to another, giving it some sort of monsoon season of attention and update before firing in another direction. This means that some are truly ghost towns for months at a time. With the additional strike of my documentary, my time is almost completely eaten up, and so the other sites have been suffering.

The idea of Wikipedia, on its face, is really neat. A bunch of people can work on an entry in a huge, growing encyclopedia, its subject matter gaining far and wide, and deep, into the whole of human knowledge. Pretty cool stuff to hear about, as you browse the outside of it. You click on some of the more complete entries, and really, you just say to yourself “wow, such a great thing is man” and so on. Maybe you wave a little flag with a logo on it. Wikipedia’s watchword is entirely collaboration. With a few exceptions, anyone can modify anything in any way, and anyone can undo their modifications, with a full tracking of the history of edits and methods included to keep track of these changes. Exciting stuff.

I had run into people who spoke of Wikipedia in a near-fanatical aspect, of how all these hands were forming these great and beautiful entries, and that it was just a matter of running along and having a great time making the whole project better. Naturally, I regarded this with suspicion and hopeful interest. I’m always interested in people doing stuff tangental to the work I do, but I always wonder if it will turn out my work has been for naught, or if in fact I’m still doing something unique and the efforts being expended on the other project are unrelated.

On the other hand, it is an awful lot of work tracking down the history of America Online or John Paul Aleshe or any of the other subjects I am always researching, and a bunch more hands kicking in would be fantastic. So I bought in, for a little while. Signed myself up and started some work.

I should pause for a moment, before I continue further. If you work on Wikipedia, I’m just going to make you angry. What I am doing is trying to stop people from working on Wikipedia with the idea that they’re accomplishing good. I am quite convinced, from the outside, over here, that no amount of suggestions from a lone voice will have any effect. Mobs don’t listen. So please, traipse happily back to Wikipedia and get cracking; someone is not eschewing a NPOV, even as you read this. Go! Go!

Note, also, that in what I’m writing about, I’m not speaking about the concept of a “Wiki”, or indicating that a collaborative tool such as Wiki software is a failure. Confined with a number of limitations on who does what in the context of undoing work, it can certainly work. It’s just software, after all. it’s the implementation that’s the sticking point.

To understand Wikipedia, it helps to understand the Usenet FAQ and its unique place in history.

The Usenet FAQ was (and is) to me, one of the true great advantages and creations of the Internet age. Previously, it had always been the case that the same 5 or 10 questions plagued a subgroup, cultural icon, hobby or occupation. These questions, while quite valid, quite reasonable, would be asked so many times that it would eventually be the case that no-one was willing to step up for the thousandth time and explain them. This led, inevitably, to speculation, wrong information and misquoting that would come back to bite everyone later. For no good reason! But the Frequently Asked Questions list fixed that. It allowed all the common questions to be answered, and even for the common controversies to be addressed even if no firm conclusion had been reached. These things grew like crazy in the 1980s and there’s massive collections of them out there, still with good information (as long as its a general subject, and not a pop star or the like), and the work of many people coming together to build something good. Like Wikipedia is supposed to be.

I would attest that the reason for the success of the FAQ was a lot of collaborators but a short list of people maintaining it. A very large amount of maintainers leads to infighting, procedural foolishness, and ultimately a very slow advancement schedule. There’s an interesting book called The Mythical Man-Month that goes into this in some detail, but the basic idea is: the more people you slap into a project that’s behind, the more the project will fall behind. Unintuitive, but true. Even in the case of raw horsepower, this becomes the case; you would think that if the basic job (photocopy this paper) was simple enough, the job would go faster with more people, but it doesn’t. You end up with people photocopying stuff wrong, collating wrong, bending pages badly, skipping pages… and the errors increase as you smack more people on. And you fall behind.

Now, at the risk of sounding a tad elitist and exclusivist, a low barrier to entry leads to crap. Maybe not initially, but with any amount of quality attached to a project, once it gains some respectability and perhaps fame or infamy, it is then beset upon by crap. By making it really, really easy to change, fundamentally, the nature of a project, you run the risk of the project becoming a battleground. A really, really crappy battleground.

For exhibit A, one merely has to traipse over to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), which is now a sub-company of Amazon. For better or worse, Amazon now defines that body of information’s future, and along the way they ended up adding a few nice features (like a very fast search engine, and links to buy the movie if you so choose). But they also added user comments.

Have you seen the user comments there? Choose a movie; I won’t bias you. Go find the threads under a $100 million picture, an Oscar-winner or an independent production. Go browse them and bring to me a thread that isn’t a garbage pile of one-line off-the-cuff nothings, a handful of withered one-sentence dandelions. Devoid of insight, meaningless to anyone truly trying to find insight into the film at hand. In many cases, these films represent years of work in someone’s life, but because tourist3398 can just log right in and ask a completely stupid question, or make an inane comment, they get equal time on that front page for a while. Ultimately, it’s insulting to the work done and it adds nothing.

The reviews that accompany each movie are slightly better, because it appears there is a moderation system in place. Reviews that are fundamentally wrong are in place, but they’re wrong in a matter of opinion, not often in a matter of being unreadable. You disagree with what’s being said, not the brickheaded way it’s being said.

The simple fact is, a low barrier to entry and an easy access to an audience tends to lead to problems. A web-based comic named Penny Arcade captured this succinctly, but I want to add that the issue is not that damage will occur immediately, but will occur over time. And eventually, given enough time, damage and low quality will win over high quality, because high quality requires effort and low quality does not.

So we come to Wikipedia.

I often get myself into trouble and lose my audience with my metaphors, but so be it. Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else, and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you. There’s no “lead mechanics”, no “shop floor managers”, no anything. In fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can’t read the manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there’s no problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you’re traipsing down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted, covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you’re kind of inclined to drive it into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.

This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It’s that there’s a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you’re now in the situation that anybody can change it. And while that’s all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it’s when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are.

If you’ve ever worked in a large company, one where not everyone’s name is known by everyone else, you’ve bumped into these people, who don’t know the thing the company makes very well, don’t keep on top of new ideas beyond buzzwords, yet wield the kind of power where they can stop and start innovation and positive growth because they simply feel like it. It’s pretty heartbreaking stuff and I hope a bunch of you never have to deal with it.

But thanks to Wikipedia, you can experience this on a daily basis! College students with too much free time deciding your subject matter is not worth reporting. Bizzare insight from strange lands telling you they didn’t think your paragraph was relevant. And ever the bizzare need for a Neutral Point of View. Neutral Point of View is a doctrine about how Wikipedia articles should be written. Like wikipedia itself, it is a great idea in theory. In application, of course, it turns into yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other and innocent bystanders.

Wikipedia is a relatively new creation, but it already quite beset with the same problems that inhabit any self-styled intellectual collaboration. People make little empires, have their agendas, push through ideas and themes they want, and disregard and delete things they do not. The main difference between this and other similar academic environments is the pure speed at which stuff can happen; you can literally have 30-40 little editing nibbles on a page within a single day. If people are feeling frisky, it can take place in a few hours. This means that you get all the politics and turf war of Ivory Tower Academia without the mitigating barrier of time to cool down or consider. That is, you get a nice big mess.

One of the stated concerns of nanotechnology (wherein a bunch of tiny things make a lot of small changes very quickly, which should sound forever) is the ‘grey goo’ problem. The concern with grey goo is poorly programmed nanobots will make a bunch of wrong incremental changes to the world and reduce everything to a grey, goo-like substance of all creation. It is not hard, browsing over historical edits to majorly contended Wikipedia articles, to see the slow erosion of facts and ideas according to people trying to implement their own idea of neutrality or meaning on top of it. Even if the person who originally wrote a section was well-informed, any huckleberry can wander along and scrawl crayon on it. This does not eventually lead to an improved final entry.

Let’s put it another way. In the motion picture industry, there’s a term called “on the screen”. It’s phrased in this way: “is this money going to end up on the screen?”. And what is meant by that is that if you pay a bunch of money to rent a spectacular shooting location, then it’s going to end up on the screen, that is, people will see the spectacular location and go “wow” and they’ll feel the movie is giving them their money’s worth. If you pay for the rights to use a location, and then there’s a hurricane and your location is wiped out and you didn’t get insurance, then you just spent a lot of money, and did no shooting. Your money is not on the screen. Other than on a bunch of reciepts, there will be no trace of the $2 million you spent on that location rental. So there’s wasted money, energy and time, and that can add up. This is what plagued movies like Cleopatra, Waterworld and Heaven’s Gate, which contained huge behind-the-scenes costs that did not result in footage, meaning the movies were now expensive blockbuster budgets with medium-level footage to show for it.

I would contend to you that the Great Failure of Wikipedia is how little truly ends up “on the screen”.

As I said, you are no longer in the role of content generator soon after your works are exposed to the wonks and twiddlers and procedural whackjobs. You are a content defender and that means that time you could be spending finding new and interesting facts or finding original sources or otherwise making the world a better place (or at least an entry or two) is being spent explaining for the hundredth time that no, this really happened and yes, I got clearance for that photograph, and yes, I believe this shows a neutral point of view, and so on. It’s like you get to play one note of your trumpet and then you spend 20 minutes defending it. To anybody who walked in. Just now.

I’m sorry, but content creators are relatively rare in this world. Content commentators less so. Content critics are a dime a hundred, and content vandals lurk in every doorway. Wikipedia lets the vandals run lose on the creators, while the commentators fill the void with chatter. It is, a failure.

Naturally, the question that arises is what solutions would I suggest to fix this situation. Well, I continue to run my own private collection of data and research and will continue to do so. You know, generating content. I made the mistake of gifting over a photograph to Wikipedia back when I thought it would be a success and not a failure, but I will not make that mistake in the future. I may offer the works I have collected and generated essentially for free to the public, but I will not give permission to Wikipedia to use them. This actually breaks the Wikipedia way, because they need explicit permission to function. It’s another fatal flaw; they will not mirror content. They are terrified of copyright violation. They are scared of what might happen if they were to copy over some text in a fair use situation and they were to be sued. So they do nothing. This is why so many links from Wikipedia are dead.

I’ve seen people point to Linux/Open Source as an example of a Wikipedia-like entity accomplishing things, but the fact is that this is a false comparision. The vast, vast, vast majority of open-source projects have a small amount of maintainers and an audience of users who, upon being able to see the code, suggest changes. If maintainers suck, they fork, but more often than not, the maintainers are told of their bugs, of feature requests, and so on, and implement them, sometimes slowly and sometimes not. Incremental improvements, not waking up one day and finding the I/O libraries gone or switched to a neutral point of view. Maybe this is a natural maturation of collaborative projects that Wikipedia hasn’t gone through yet. Time will tell on that level.

Already, there are many Wikis out there, sites using Wikipedia-like software (but interestingly, not often the exact software, choosing instead to implement their own version of the heirarchy and approach) and then collecting knowledge. Wikipedia calls them “Knowledge Bases”. I call them “Wikipedias”. I think over time, people will want to get away from the grey goo of Wikipedia’s mess and move towards specialized or properly-run Wikis, which contain, not a cabal, but at least a slight barrier to entry that will ensure that the person who is going to undo your hours of work with a few mouse clicks is at least, from some relatively objective standpoint, vaguely entitled to do so.

Meanwhile, I will aim my energy in my own direction, knowing that while my tools will be where I left them the previous morning, they’ll also still be recognizable as my tools.

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Sometimes people wonder how a site like textfiles.com can even be up in the modern world. Sometimes I ask that myself. However, be assured that my life is occasionally interrupted with threats, legal and otherwise. The legal ones are always interesting because someone is being paid to threaten me.

Today, I was finally made aware of a threat waved against my person by a law firm representing C.R. Bard, Inc. of Murray Hill, NJ. Apparently the august firm of Oblon, Spivak, McClelland, Maire and Neustadt had attempted to contact me previously on this pressing matter but were unable to do so. But this time around, they were able to reach me and pass unto me the important news.

Among the other fine jewels and artifacts in the textfiles.com collection are a handful of erotic stories. Over 5,000, in fact. They were primarily the gift of one or two individuals who really liked collecting them. It was pretty simple to put them up. But along the way, they have caused me the occasional headache. One such headache was people who wrote erotic stories in their younger, more lusty years, and signed their real names to them only to later discover that stories they had posted to the internet were still online, with their real names signed to them. Naturally, they come to me, in tones ranging from amused to wild-eyed angry. I get around to the amused ones quicker.

Such it is that we apparently run into the unique situation of the C.R. Bard company and their fine line of products. I hope most people who read this site do not have to deal with such foolish legalistics, but there is an interesting doctrine called dilution of trademark. Let me explain.

In the idea of dilution of trademark, the use of someone’s brand to describe or advocate an illegal or immoral act represents damage to that brand’s reputation. In this case, C.R. Bard, Inc. (of Murray Hill, NJ), the makers of a fine line of medical catheter devices, are completely against the idea that their products could be used in any way to deliver enemas. That is, while they do advocate the use of their materials in standard acceptable ways, under no circumstances should their products foment a rectal invasion. It is wrong, and potentially dangerous to a potential customer in a potential situation where the potential customer has decided to give himself a potential enema using a handy potential device. In this case, we speak of the BARDEX trademark of C.R. Bard, Inc., which does not apparently include devices intended for enemas. Regardless of the fact that it appears many, many people refer to the idea of a “BARDEX Enema”, they are apparently entirely incorrect and unlawful in doing so… not to mention unsanitary.

While I have a lot of people cry “free speech” and “fair use”, in fact this does NOT fall under fair use, thanks to a law called the Lanham Act. Under a somewhat-liberal interpretation of this statute:

Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which– (A) is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person, or….

Getting sleepy. Anyway, it’s a bit of a jump to indicate that textfiles.com, which has no cost, no goods, and no advertising, is intentionally misleading people as to the use of C.R. Bard’s fine product line of BARDEX Catheters because the website contains a set of erotic stories pertaining to enemas. But, they have money and I do not.

The stories are gone, stored away for a rainy day somewhere else besides the Internet. I will not take their suggestion from their letter: “Accordingly, we request you revise the stories to refer to a balloon nozzle, enema bulb or some other generic phrase, without referring to our client’s trademark.” While I have been involved in some interesting side projects along the lifetime of textfiles.com, the careful re-editing of years-old enema stories to not involve the BARDEX trademark is certainly not in the top of my to-do-list.

On a side note, I am not the only site to have suffered the crushing mental blows of the C.R. Bard Company and their valiant lawyer, Roberta S. Bren (who I will refrain from calling the True and Rightful Defender of the Proper Enema). In fact, it turns out that should you decide to commit suicide after a period of worshipping Satan, you are not to refer to the idea of a Vodka Enema as one that requires a BARDEX device. Heed well, purveyors of (fatal) vodka enemas.

For people who are skimming, here is a copy of the threatening letter.

NOT the True and Rightful Defender of The Proper Enema

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Geekdom, extreme geekdom, does not just have depths, my friends; it has heights.

1982. Atari Games, to celebrate the creation of their Atari 2600 Pac-Man Game (which, I might add, was one of the most pathetic, slapdash, slipshod piece of programming ever to churn out of a development studio) held a massive “Pac Man Day” in Citicorp Center in New York City. Being a confessed “Pac Maniac”, I couldn’t resist. To complete the picture, you have to know that I had that great uncontrolled 11-year-old hair of unequal length, and an old army fatigue jacket with a “PAC MAN” t-shirt transfer on the back. Now, it was me and literally THOUSANDS of kids jammed into the inadequately-planned celebration area at the Center, with all of us vying for places to stand and have fun. They had a pac-man “look alike” contest, which only had maybe a dozen of us actually show enough nerve to go up on stage, and due to a REALLY LOUD chomping sound, I placed somewhere around third. Of course, this is up to dispute, because the place essentially turned into a riot (I can still recall my father up on a balcony, screaming at me to stand against a wall so I wouldn’t be stepped on) and they generally just THREW stuff into the crowd, but I was third.

This is a memory I will hold dear until all of time. It was not a depth. It was a pinnacle. It was a heady, breathless moment in time in which my own fannish interest in something led me to a situation, a unique situation, that could barely be explained to others without sounding truly off-the-wall, absolutely beyond saving. And like many such unique events, you hold a fear in your heart, beyond the memory, a fear that as time goes on you will not feel such things again.

So, as I sit here typing these words to you, I know I have achieved something of equal, deep geekdom.

I have attended an off-broadway musical based on The Last Starfighter.

For two precious weeks, already down 3 performances, the Storm Theatre in New York City, just next to Times Square, is playing host to The Last Starfighter, a musical based on the film of the same name. If spoilers do not interest you, if you only want the simplest of directions and want to make the next right move, then heed these words: if you live within driving, walking, bus or train distance of New York City, see this musical. Immediately.

Within the Storm Theatre’s well-worn but proud walls, up several flights of stairs and in one of a few dozen seats, you will join an elite and unique crowd who have seen this musical put forth on its debut run.

This is not a big-budget production, billowing with special effects and the smell of untold thousands of dollars of smoke machines and sound equipment assaulting your senses. The sets, a trailer park and non-descript spaceport, are constructed on simple flats, painted professionally, and all put on with the air of summer stock.

However, the performers, production team, and staff were all true professionals, knowing what people in their business know; all show business is silly, but performances demand respect. And delivered as this musical was, with straightforward verve, full energy, and a healthy regard for the work, a very special moment happened for me, as it may very well for you.

Natural questions abound in the mind, especially if you know of the plot of the original movie; where could songs go? How would it be arranged? What sort of music would this be? Allow me to give an overview of what awaits.

We meet the residents of a trailer park where nothing much exciting happens, but where they speak of a recent story that changed their lives (“Starlite, Starbrite”). William Parry, playing Otis, leads the rest of the cast, eleven actors of all ages, into an overview of the story in a voice caring, learned, and professional. Returning to a month before, in April of 1983, we meet Alex Rogan, played by the clear-eyed Charlie Pollock, who is awaiting a loan for college so he can stop being the repairboy for the entire park (“Somebody, Somewhere, Something”).

Alex’s girlfriend, Maggie, played by the beautiful Julia Motyka, joins the rest of the residents in marvelling how his abilities with a video game could have led to the wonderous events that followed (“Little Did We Know (The Game)”).

Alex has scored a new record on The Last Starfighter, but has also learned he will not have the loans to go to college. Despairing, he is counseled by Otis that life has many surprises and things to look forward to (“Things Change”).

Alex is then greeted by a strange huckster character named Centauri, brought to life by the spot-on performance of Joseph Kolinski. In the original film, this part was played as a non-singing role by the immortal Robert Preston of The Music Man fame, and it is a pleasure to see Kolinski channel Preston as he invites Alex out to the stars (“Out of This World”). He is told that the video game he has been playing has actually trained him to be a Starfighter, and Centauri and Alex travel to the planet Rylos, where a battle to save the universe is underway.

After being introduced to the aliens and creatures at the Rylos Port (“Star League Hymn”) a hologram appears in the spaceport, where Bernardo De Paula’s Zur, the son of the leader of Rylos, proclaims his anger and revenge for being shut out of his right to succession (“Father to Son”).

Meanwhile, back on earth, the android double of Alex has been confusing Maggie by reacting strangely when she confesses her devotion to him. The women of the trailer park, voiced with passion by Deegee Brandemour, Jan Leigh Herndon and Georga Osborne, explain to Maggie the power of love and its many forms (“Love is Like Water”).

Alex, uncomfortable with being put in the place of an actual starfighter, and learning that Centauri may have recruited him for a profit motive, returns to Earth. Centauri asks him to reconsider and be a part of the battle, one which involves Earth (“A Hero”). He is given a device to summon Centauri if he changes his mind.

We return to the present day, as Alex Rogan’s kid brother Louis, played with crispness by 9th grader Travis Walters, begs to be given the chance to tell the story of the assassin alien that came to town. He launches into a slightly ribald and slapstick retelling of the events, bringing in playboy bunnies, floating windows, and the rest of the town into the story and an all-cast dance number (“Zandozan”). I must confess, at this moment, how ravishing actress Heather Spore was as Miss July.

The Zendozan is killed by Centauri, who explains that after this assassin will come hundreds more, and now Earth is directly in the battle. Alex chooses to return to join the fight (“Hero Reprise”).

We start the second act watching teenage hijynx on a beach and an Alex Double who simply can’t make sense of how he should treat Maggie (“Spring Break”). A second Zandozan shoots the android and he realizes he must return home to warn the Star League, stealing a truck to do so. He explains the situation to Maggie before destroying himself to stop the Zandozan from relaying the message that Alex has become a Starfighter.

Maggie, scared for Alex and knowing he is her true love, sings of her feelings for him, while Alex sings of his feelings for her many light-years away (“Reach Out”).

In a spectacularly staged (considering the props and lights available) battle, Alex and Centauri take on the approaching forces and destroy them, while all the cast sing of the battle (“Caves of the Heart (The Battle)”). Zur is destroyed, although some of his disciples escape.

Back at the trailer park, the residents assemble towards a bright light, from whence comes Alex and Centauri to tell them of their battle and for Alex to both declare his love for Maggie and to bring her back with him to the stars, an offer she happily accepts (“Finale”).

Hardcore followers of the original movie will notice a number of changes in the musical that diverge from what they might expect. Grig, previously Alex’s close companion on the ship, is now merely Centauri’s brother and quickly disabled in the battle. The Death Blossom, which was once untested and dangerous to the ship, is but a smart bomb and a second, more devastating weapon might be fatal to Alex and Centauri as they use it for the first time. Most of these changes make sense, as they allow Centauri to have a more complete presence in several song numbers, and they allow additional pacing in the battle and other sequences.

For these changes, other important details stay in; the video game still blares out “Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited…” and the last words of the Ko-Dan empire remain the immortal “What do we do now?” “We die.”

It is difficult to describe the feelings as one sits through this production. For vital minutes at the beginning of the show, your mind reels, over and over: “I am watching a musical production of The Last Starfighter. I am watching a musical production of The Last Starfighter”. This said, however, I found my half-smirk and wide eyes quickly overcome with the poignant, powerful song sung by Zur to his estranged parent, “Father to Son”. It speaks of his rightful place, his hereditary throne denied him, his pain at being left in the cold and lost without meaning, which is why he now intends to destroy the very world he was rejected from. It is strong. It is touching. It is, at the end, a very real song delivered by a very real performer.

So too, the three weathered but smiling ladies who sing to the young Maggie in “Love is Like Water”. Their voices circle each other, dancing among the playful rhymes and naughty asides. As they speak of love’s power, so too does Maggie, her head resting in a caring lap, learn the wisdom of the generations before her.

Two other numbers stand out.

“Reach Out”, the song of two lovers who wish for each other’s hearts across a galaxy, is what one expects it to be: moving, caring, and sung with grace. “Caves of the Heart (The Battle)” both accurately evokes the feelings of the original film’s fight sequences but brings its own special quality as cast members sing along of the war being waged from both sides.

This is not to say there aren’t a dozen other moments that spoke out to me. Certainly, “A Hero”‘s evoking of “little teacher named Scopes” and many other historical names was special, as well as the clever echoing in ‘Spring Break” as the Beta android mimics Blake’s sleazy lines to his girl. Lyricist/Musician Skip Kennon, who has a good list of credits to his name (he wrote music for The Hunchback of Notre Dame Part II, and before you snicker, Disney doesn’t generally hire hacks), has peppered the score with many clever themes (“Go Alex, Go Alex” is repeated in many situations) and at no point do you feel cheated or that there is any lack of effort in the music or performing.

And this is the magic of this event, of my driving from Boston to New York City and back in one day, to be there to witness the performance. I was a part of something, a time when my geekdom and fandom broke new ground, proud ground, something I will carry forever.

While waiting for the doors to open, I struck up a conversation with another attendee. We discussed where we had come from to see it. I was proud I’d just driven 150 miles to attend.

He had flown in from Denver.

For the day.

To see this musical.

Sometimes, we think we have achieved the pinnacle, and then, slowly, we glance upward and see we have even farther to climb.

See this musical. See it.

Update: The soundtrack of this musical is now available.

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I’m staggering this information out slowly, but the BBS Documentary DVD set is now available for pre-order. The page to pre-order it from is http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/order. Everyone who signed up to be notified is now notified.

Basically, you can order my set from KAGI.COM and PAYPAL.COM. Between them, they can handle almost every major money transaction there is, which is why I chose them.

I’ll be changing the main site to reflect this new ability shortly.

Also, there’s a very good reason to order now… if you order before November 10th, you can actually give me a 2000-character paragraph that will be put in a ROM section on the DVD set. That’s right, the BBS Documentary DVD will have a sort of BBS right on it. I think that’s pretty neat.

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Imagine you have, in front of you, a machine. It is unlike any other machine in the world, although it might look like a lot of them.

On this machine are your dreams, dreams you had about people you once knew and a life you once lived, or wanted to live. In these dreams, people are talking to you. They’re talking about things you cared about, because their answers are to questions you asked. They are all over the continent, and when they talk about memories they have of certain places, you have them too.

All of these answers are on your machine, all 3,500 of them. All you have to do is assemble them into seven stories. For nearly every part of the story, you have at least 3 people tell that part perfectly. You merely have to choose the best one for that moment.

You have spent three years to build this machine. You will spend two months riding it. It will then produce a finished, refined sphere of these dreams for everyone to share.

Get going.

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One of the advantages of going through my documentary and related DVD creation is that I get to put my personal mark or belief into the whole process. That is, at critical junctures where I saw things I didn’t like in documentaries and DVDs, I can now go “I will do this differently.” Or, maybe more interestingly, decide to do the same things because I can now understand the choices that were made.

The DVDs will not have Region Encoding. I hate Region encoding; it’s a pathetic attempt to control the market by crippling a product to only work in certain places and not work in others. If I pay the incredibly foolish amount of money to bring a DVD in from Japan, I should be worried about the cost, the quality of the production, and whether I can get all my buddies together to see it this Saturday; I shouldn’t be hoping my DVD player is going to “let” me watch it!

I will not have sequences in the DVD you can’t get out from. When you pop in a lot of DVDs, you have to sit through a logo, or some ad, or some other annoying thing between you and the film. This makes no sense to me. If people buy my DVD, they’re probably going to pop it in a few times and, at some point, having bought the thing and all, they’re probably going to watch all the stuff on the DVD. Or maybe they won’t; they’ll just watch the Fidonet episode over and over and then burn it. It’s their right! And if they see my logo and decide they want to go straight to the menu, who am I to tell the machine to stop them?

I am not going to have that dumb little sticker on the top of the DVD case. You know the one I’m talking about: the annoying little sticker that binds the case shut so you can’t open it, even if you’ve already removed the shrink wrap. You pull on the case, and half of it opens and half doesn’t, and now you’re trying desperately to remove that dumb sticker to get inside. I understand it’s an anti-shoplifting measure, but I’ve seen it inside box sets. You have the box wrapped up in shrink wrap, then you get to the DVDs inside, and then each one has the Sticker of Death on it. I have specifically asked the DVD company not to have one on my DVDs.

I will have subtitles. Can you imagine? So many productions I see, especially independent ones, don’t take the evening to add subtitles. Honestly. It takes an evening; I’ve proven this. An evening to add them, maybe a second to proofread them. I press the subtitle button my DVD, get the X, and I am automatically disappointed. I don’t want to disappoint others with my own work.

I have other beliefs I’ll be sticking to as we ram into the last few months of production; I’ll announce them as they become relevant.

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I’m happy to finally give some firm information about the release of the documentary and a chance for people to see it before it’s released on DVD. This has been years in the making, so I’m pretty excited about the whole thing.

First of all, I have basically committed to finish the BBS documentary this year. Since it’s September, that’s not very long from now. I hope to be able to have the DVDs out before Christmas, although to do a DVD “right” means possible delays or other unexpected turns. Regardless, I intend to have these works “in the can” before the end of the year.

And while the entire project will be a 3 DVD set, you really can’t have a film without some sort of “premiere”… so one has been arranged.

The BBS Documentary will have a “beta premiere” at the Vintage Computer Festival 7.0, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This event goes on from the 6th to the 7th of November, 2004. At this show, all the episodes of the BBS documentary will be played, with breaks in between, across the two days.

The reason I am calling this a “beta premiere” is because these will not be the final versions of the episodes! In fact, I expect to have a month of editing after the event to clean things up and go through everything a few more times. The spirit of this documentary through all of the work has been to keep as much research and process as open as possible, and it made sense to do it one more time.

One should never say never, but this should be the only public showing of the episiodes before they become DVDs.

As an extra bonus, a good set of people interviewed in the documentary are apparently going to show up. Let’s make a party of it!

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