ASCII by Jason Scott

International Shipping Ends — April 30, 2013

I’m no longer going to take international orders.

This is not a light decision. International orders are half my sales. But I have to do it.

So, here’s what’s been happening on the back end for a while: people order one of my documentaries, GET LAMP or the BBS Documentary. About once a week, when I have time, I ingest all the orders, print out labels, put them on packaged boxes for the documentaries. If they’re domestics, that is, US-bound, then I have a nice stack of them in a box ready to go.

If they’re internationals, well, depends. If it was a couple months ago, I would fill out a relatively simple form, a one pager, that stuck to the box as well. I could print out the label for myself and the recipient, fill out a couple blank spots, and then it was done. I would then take these two sets to the post office locally, where I’ve built up a nice relationship with the gang, even waiting to the side if the lines are long, and then sending out my own set when the place would die down. Out it goes, everyone’s happy.

I knew I was on borrowed time with that simple green form – my post office buddies told me it’d been phased out for another option, and it was just usual post office overlap letting the “old” form still be valid when they wanted the “new” form. I asked if the new form was easier. The look in their eyes….

In January of this year, the Post Office changed their international (and other rates). And by changed, I mean jacked up beyond belief. A DVD box that cost me $9 to ship is now $15. Some of them are higher. or equivalent where they used to be $8. I used to have a flat shipping rate for “internationals” and let it eat into the price. Now it basically devours the price. And the form that the post office people warned me about is definitely up to its reputation, because I can’t use pre-printed labels anymore – I have to sit there and write on multiple copies (the pens don’t really go through worth a damn) and there’s much more to fill out.

I do not want to bore you with endless details about the research I did to show that it’s now intensely difficult to send all this out. I do not want your brilliant suggestion of how I can save money with all sorts of tricks and traps to sneak around it (media mail doesn’t work that way for this stuff, other services are just as onerous, and I’m not interested in working with ‘a guy’ in Europe). I’m telling you that it’s over – the problem isn’t that I can’t probably hack some solution together that makes it merely a time-sink and trap-filled – it’s that with all my duties at the Internet Archive and all my other projects, I just can’t devote hours to this packaging.

And it’s not like it’s the image of Good Ol’ Jason working on these documentaries in his spare time anymore. I get yelled at for not having tracking numbers, for it taking a week to get to people (or longer, as per the delay in doing internationals). People think of it as a business that’s just shipping out documentaries. Parts of my life are slipping because of this time sink. Something has to give.

What does this mean going forward?

First, again, no international orders. Those are leaving the order pages today.

Second, for the last year or something I’ve been predicting where things are going in the future for my next documentaries. The answer is going to be REALLY super deluxe packaging, like in the $100 range, that’s a physical product, or digital download/streaming. In other words, a push to the extreme ends, instead of a somewhat expensive nice package. People who want something in their hands will get it but it’ll be pretty costly, and most will not want that. The others will get digital copies, and those will be pretty low cost and available quite freely worldwide. I knew it was coming, and I’ll be refactoring my current films this summer to fit that new paradigm. And the new ones will have that regardless.

So there you go.

I expect to answer lots of e-mails going “WHY DO YOU NOT SHIP INTERNATIONAL” and “WHY CAN’T YOU SHIP TO CANADA AT LEAST” and so on. Hopefully this entry will be something I can point to.

Do I like this? No. Am I proud of it? No. But it’s reflection of where I am in my life right now – my inbox is FILLED, BURSTING with people asking me in the role I play at the Internet Archive and Archive Team to help them with projects and research, attend conferences, provide consulting, and save materials both physical and digital. That’s what needs me. Being The World’s Worst Amazon Seller is not the best use of me.

I’ve sold many thousands of these things. I’m sure I’ll sell a few more domestically and I’ll always endeavor to have some on my person at all times to be able to do transactions in person.

But it’s over. Internationals are done. Please forgive me.

26 Comments

Change Computer History Forever: Well, Here We Are — April 13, 2013

When Brewster hired me in 2011, he had the foresight to recognize I’d spread in many directions once I was under the auspiciousness of the Internet Archive, but he definitely had one overarching goal with my employment. Paraphrasing, it was this: the Archive had done very well with books, music, visual items, and of course websites – but it was sorely lacking in the realm of software. My provided goal was do for software what archive.org has been doing for all these other mediums.

In short summary, I have done that.

Thanks to the additions of the Shareware CD Archive, the TOSEC archive, the FTP site boneyard, and the Disk Drives collection, and the encouraging of the hosting of the Classic PC Games library along with the (in-process) integration of Fileplanet…. The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world. Find me someone bigger.

Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 years is settling in. But since software is just that, programs and materials, it’s best to have some documentation and writing regarding it as well.

I’m well along on that too: the Computer Magazines collection is well over 10,000 individual issues of computer magazines and journals. If they’re not magazines, they might be newsletters and there’s a Computer Newsletters collection for that, with thousands of THOSE issues as well. Or books! Maybe you’re looking for books and in the Folkscanomy project, I’ve set aside a section just of computer books. Obviously there might be some hardware issues or information you would need, so be aware the Folkscanomy collection has an electronics section that veers here and there into the computer and programming realms as well.

No, no, SIT DOWN. I’m not done. The mirroring of the amazing Bitsavers Project means that over 25,000 documents that group have been digitizing for almost 20 years are right online, readable and downloadable at a whim. I’ve been separating them into company type, but I currently do that by hand so it’s uneven. Either way, an automatic process now does the ingestion, meaning anywhere from 10-100 new documents enter that library a week.

Regular ephemera? I’ve been doing a little of that on the side and working with people. It’s called the Reader Service collection. Gems aplenty there, I can promise you.

So, between all this material, and much more is coming in, the Internet Archive gives you unrestricted access to the largest collection of computer history and software in the world, bar none. Bar none.

So what’s the problem?

Well, our metadata is shit, I can tell you that. We’re not good at having all the careful twee metadata entry that most archives and libraries demand. If you look at, say, the Apple I manual we have online, it’s kind of just that – an Apple I manual. Not much detail, page listing, context. It’s just there. Preserved, easily accessed, easily read – but not described all that much. That’s a thing. People in more formal disciplines might call that a showstopper. I call it a minor issue for the moment, but one worth improving.

The other weirdness is that a lot of material is inside other archives that have to be browsed using the Archive.org’s file browser. So here’s some examples: The insides of a DOOM Level CD-ROM. A view of the entire software output for the Colecovision. The racy insides of the Devil’s Doorknob BBS. There they are, but you have to do a little digging.

Yes, this is a crate digger’s paradise. The cries of “Look what they had, they didn’t even know they had it” should echo through these stacks. The superior feeling of being the first to find a rare demo of a game that nobody ever ultimately released. The citation you note deep in an advertisement in a computer magazine for a promised hardware family that never came to fruition, or did with radically scaled-back qualities. It’s in there.

But these are problems of effort, not of possibility. That’s all they are.

More importantly, here’s the question I now ask the culture, the world, the people who might read this or get pointed to it.

Are you ready for this? Are you in?

What I mean, is that for well over 20 years now, I’ve been in the world and the culture of the software collector, the curator, the theorist, the fan. That is my life, to have been part of this group. Some of them have gone into some very professional circles with this hope in their heart to bring something like this around, but an awful lot of life and fear and reality has gotten in the way. A lot of people are well on their way towards these goals, to have this much online, this much available, this much right there and allowing us to do the Next Steps.

Well, we’re here. Now what.

There is now a fully-accessible, worldwide-reachable, massive-bandwidth and completely unrestricted collection of computer history up right now, in these collections I’ve just mentioned. Some are mirrors of incredible projects that have been around long before this moment, and let me not diminish their continued work. But some of these efforts needed that little extra bit of access, that ease of reading and downloading, and now that is here. The URLs on archive.org are designed to be permanent. This link to a little running cat (NEKO, which has been around since Macintosh days) will, barring incredible disaster, be around for a very long and dependable time. So will this collection of 30 gigabytes of Amiga software. And notably, over 360 people have downloaded that 30 gigabyte collection, absconding like Bilbo Baggins out of the mountain. Fine! Enjoy! Have a great time! But the point is, if someone asks for where it came from, they can point right here, and here it is. In a library. Online, like it belongs.

So where are you?

Where are the students of computer history who needed primary source material, downloadable images and PDF files of every description from which to make their thesis statements and reports?

Where are the bloggers and essayists who are putting together in-depth, critical, long-reaching and ranging assessments of historical events to provide context to today?

Where are the people dedicated to busting some of these lame-ass software patents that have clogged and destroyed so much innovation, all in the name of some corporate worship that says that someone patenting breathing oxygen is helping the world improve?

When do I get to see the brilliance of works like this that shed amazing new light into these old things?

This is it, folks. This is the ideal world I’ve heard whispered about, referenced, and planned for a very long time. It’s here. I know you might have expected it to land with an earth-shattering boom but it was a slow and steady flowering on the Internet Archive’s servers. The Archive of Historical Computer Software is here, and it is very, very large.

Blow me away.

41 Comments

Here is How Not to Do It — April 9, 2013

Here is how not to treat your customers, especially ones that think you’re doing a great project and support you at a time before you’ve proven yourself.

In February of 2012 (be sure you read that correctly, 2012), I attended a screening of Linotype: The Film at the Typekit offices (now fully owned by Adobe). We were shown this excellent film, itself full of life and wonder and history. I was entranced, and delighted someone had gone through the effort to make a documentary on this subject.

At the back of the room, after the screening, members were encouraged to purchase copies of the film, with a standard and deluxe edition available. Naturally, as I like to have unique things, I ordered the deluxe edition. At that point, the deluxe edition did not exist as a product and we were pre-ordering. It was $75.

Later, a photo of the deluxe edition was made available. It would look like this:

The description was similar to this, while it was still up for sale: “This deluxe case is hand-made by film participant, Davin Kuntze in Brooklyn, NY. Limited to 100 cases, we only have 6 left for sale. Using the highest quality materials, this deluxe case will sit on your shelf proudly. Included in the case is a brass matrix and a slug of Linotype type that says “Linotype: The Film 2012″ along with the DVD.”

In December of 2012, apologies were made for the delay in getting the Deluxe edition out the door. I’d already bought the “standard” edition at this point. It was now 10 months past the ordering date. They’d informed me this by e-mail, by the way.

In February of 2013, I went to New Zealand for a few weeks. While I was there, the case was delivered, but as they’d put a delivery confirmation on it, the case was bounced and a “your package was not picked up” was left for me. I didn’t find this slip of paper in the pile of mail until March.

Finally, I wrote to ask them to send it again.

This is what I got back:

From: Doug Wilson <doug@onpaperwings.com>
Subject: Re: Linotype: The Film Deluxe DVD Cases Have Shipped!
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 14:21:31 -0500
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason,

Thank you for your email.

Your Deluxe DVD was returned to us as "undeliverable" in early February 
and we did not have any other contact information for you to try and get 
it to a new address.

We waited over a month to hopefully hear from you, but we then sold the 
Deluxe case as it was not claimed. I'm very sorry to say that we are 
completely sold out of the Deluxe cases.

I would be happy to refund your original $75 payment via a charge back 
to your card (I would need the last 4 digits of the card and card type) 
or via PayPal.

Again, I'm very sorry this happened.

All the best,

Doug Wilson
Director & Producer
"Linotype: The Film - In Search of the Eighth Wonder of the World"
http://www.linotypefilm.com

Let us contemplate how the sky looks in Doug Wilson’s world.

If someone gives you $75, speculatively, and then you sit on that money for a year while you get your act together with your craftsman, and then when you mail it you run into a standard, old, run of the mill issue with postal mail, that gives you the right to just go ahead and resell that item.

Never mind it’s a severe limited edition. Never mind that you had the e-mail address of the person and didn’t request a follow up. Never mind that you could probably be assured that someone who gave you $75 and whose address you had, and who didn’t raise a fuss for the year you took to deliver, was probably a bit of a fan.

No, you get to just go ahead and dump that shit to the next person to wave the money.

When GET LAMP was funded due to people giving me $50 in 2006, and the movie came out in 2010, I mailed out the promised packages from that club. Those packages all got delivered, except a small amount.

I still have those packages, three years later.

They are sitting in my storage unit, as I try occasionally to track down the people involved, and get their attention, and see about them getting their promised edition, that they paid for 7 years ago.

Because that’s what you do.

Unless you’re Doug Wilson.

Don’t be Doug Wilson.

4 Comments

An Open Letter to TOSEC — March 8, 2013

From my posting on the TOSEC development forum:

Hello, everyone. My name is Jason Scott, and my position is “free-range Archivist” at the Internet Archive (archive.org). I’m here as a private individual, and not as a spokesman for the Archive in any way.

I’ve been working there for about two years and have used them and interacted with their staff for significant years before that. I’m now a full-time employee and have been busy bringing in several hundred terabytes of data into their stacks. Along the way I’ve been adding all sorts of material, ranging from videos, magazines, and books, all the way through to software, website snapshots, and scientific papers.

However, my main interests in life seem to center around computer history, especially home computer history of the 1970s and 1980s. To that end, I’ve made a documentary about computer bulletin board systems, as well as a documentary on text adventures. I’ve uploaded most of the raw interview footage of these films to archive.org as well.

As a few people noted here (and elsewhere), I’ve begun uploading collections of program images named in the TOSEC format to archive.org. These are being added as large ZIP files, which works better among the archive.org item framework. A .ZIP browser built into the system allows per-image references. A good example of this system in place is here: http://archive.org/details/Camputers_Lynx_TOSEC_2012_04_23

In the case of these items, I’m standardizing on the date of the set for that platform, with this first set being moved right up to the date of the collection I acquired (2012-04-23). As updates are done, I’ll make new items. (I realize this means lots of redundancy in the image collections, but space is not a problem at the Archive, and it’s easier to just have multiple items and move people forward over time). It’s all still in rough shape and will be refined in the future.

I don’t wish to pull anyone’s energy or time away from the TOSEC work being done – I just know this project was going to gain attention over here, and I wanted it known I was the person doing this. Now for the why.

Huge organizations, museums and archives and libraries alike, have begun taking an interest in preserving software or aspects of software. In some cases they wish to preserve the items (say, a boxed commercial program) while in others, they find themselves desperately in need of older software (say, a copy of a word processing program or spreadsheet) to allow them to look at acquired old files they’ve been donated. They are often slow, are constantly hindered in their actions because of management or administrative concerns or standards, and are often forced to make less-of-two-evil decisions when it comes to the software being preserved.

TOSEC, meanwhile, has run a decades-plus massive worldwide effort to agnostically save as much of this software as possible. TOSEC has, with no question, blown past any other professional effort in terms of size and breadth of the software they’ve quantified and described. It is a stunning achievement. I have brought professional archivists near to tears showing them the work TOSEC has done.

So I’ve put it on the Archive. I realize there are concerns and debates about this effort, and I understand them. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library with worldwide servers dedicated to bringing humanity’s knowledge to as much of the world as possible. We are known the most for the Wayback machine, but we also have scanned over 2 million books and put most of them online, as well as thousands of movies, hundreds of thousands of music tracks, and an extensive amount of television news programs from around the world. Every 90 seconds, the Archive adds a new book: http://statusboard.archive.org and many, many new files are uploaded every day, of all types.

I respect the TOSEC effort, and hope to mirror as much of it as will shake out over the next couple months and years at the Archive. It’s a bold experiment, to be sure, but I believe very strongly that computer history needs to move forward and software must be treated like the culturally relevant artifact it is.

I’m reachable at jscott@archive.org for comments and questions.

Thanks.

4 Comments

The Javascript MESS Enters Beta — January 23, 2013

Been working a long time towards this moment. A lot of good people working on a lot of good code, and helping each other towards this insane goal.

JSMESS is in open beta. Four game consoles and one computer are supported. Many more are coming.

I first postulated this was possible in October of 2011, and I laid out the reasons why this action would lead to a bunch of great side effects and advantages. The MESS emulator, a derivative of the MAME emulation system, had the ability to run or at least engage with running a whole host of computer systems, spanning 40 years of history. The philosophies of MAME, “emulate everything first, do it better and faster later” as well as “declare a system to be a set of discrete emulated chips, then crank on making the chips emulated as well as possible”, have yielded incredible fruit. The MAME and MESS page host lists of what’s been updated with each new version and revision – hundreds of changes every month. If emulation is your bag, or you want to improve our ability as a culture to revisit computers, consoles and arcade games, MAME and MESS continue to be your bag, your best use of your time.

In just four short years, MAME will have had 20 years of intense development on it. And that thing is a brutal, amazing piece of work, nay, of programming art. MESS, the variation for consoles and computers, has had nearly as much effort put into it as well. These are worthwhile endeavors, ported to amazing amounts of platforms. They’re the Emulation Standard.

All that’s going on here is porting MESS so that it runs in a browser via Javascript. The goal is to make it that MESS runs in a browser without a plugin or external program being called. Such a simple idea: Add “Web Browsers” as one of the myriad platforms MESS/MAME runs on. But also so complicated. If you want to hear my video pitch about this as I’ve been describing it to people, here’s one.

A lot of people have spend many hours on this, including Justin de Vesine, Alon Zakai, Andre D, Nintendud, and Justin Kerk. They all deserve accolade for getting us where we are now.

What’s on the roadmap?

We didn’t just import the ability of MESS to emulate – this port brings in all the many features of MESS that it has developed to work with the items. In some cases, you can hit the TAB key and see all the information and features baked in, but in some cases you can’t, so we’re making sure support for calling these other features will arrive with the first 1.0 issue of JSMESS.
Specifically, MESS has the ability to call on save states, meaning we can use regular MESS to play or load something, save the state, and it’ll just “work” and be at a specific breakpoint in the computer experience, say having the same Shakespeare sonnet in a multitude of word processors, or being at a high level in a game so you can see a kill screen in action and try to negotiate it even further.
The keybindings are a mess, and so we’ll want instructions for these different individual emulators to fix that up and maybe set things so that they go to keys that every keyboard has. (For example, the ColecoVision emulator really wants the Number Pad, which not every computer has.)
Speed, speed, speed. We’ve got some notable slowness for some of the emulations. We have great hope we can fix it, but always like advice towards doing this. The original native MESS compiles all work fine for speed, so it’s a matter of improving the Javascript as well as the Emscripten program for converting items to JS in the first place.

The fun is just beginning! I’m so excited.

1 Comment

Just Solve Dan Tobias’ Problem (and File Formats, too). — January 16, 2013

As you might harken back, I announced two things last year: that November was “Just Solve the Problem Month”, and that the first “problem” to solve was “File Formats”.

I even had a logo!

Well, let’s quickly discuss what’s happened since the month came to a close.

Most notably, we got a bunch of data on the wiki set up for that month of problem-solving. The site was loaded with all sorts of beginnings, all sorts of well-tended entries, and only a small amount of infighting as to direction. And then we hit the end of the month.

Now, many projects of these sorts peter out and kind of, well, stop. But we’ve had quite the miracle.

Dan Tobias. He took the torch, dude. He (and also HalftheIsland, who has been in there as well) has been editing stuff by the hundreds. And the wiki has gotten better, and better and better.

So Dan has a problem. He’s lonely in there! He needs more help!

This is your time to shine. We have a working Wiki with a clear permanent url:

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org

The File Formats Wiki continues to add material all the time, allows you to add all sorts of information, and brings into focus a whole range of file format enumeration and spotlights. It’s working. People are noticing.

I’ve made it so people can register new accounts instantly. I’ve also made it so that I’m not the only admin/moderator there. It’s time to bring this thing to version 2.0 and beyond.

And benefit from it! The thing is there as reference material. Let’s use it that way.

I look forward to it growing and contining its path. And I want Dan to have a lot more buddies on there doing the goal.

However this works out, my hat is off to you, Dan. You’ve been kicking ass.

3 Comments

The Scanning Brigade Comes Home (Join me in NY) — January 14, 2013

I wrote an entry a while ago about a crazy idea called The Charge of the Scan Brigade. The idea was simple: use some of the downtime in the Internet Archive SF offices to have a line of volunteers do scanning of computer history and other material on the Scribe scanners Internet Archive uses. In this way, we could have a nice sideline of incoming obscure media and data (manuals, notes, booklets, ephemera) getting a nice professional once over.

Didn’t work out.

The reason was a by-product of me being a remote worker – due to changing funding, archive.org doesn’t currently scan anything for an evening shift, just a day shift, and they’ve never had a weekend shift like I was expecting. And I wanted a weekend evening shift!

So I withdrew, and waited, and started working on a plan B.

Plan B is now in effect.

That’s my friend Chris Orcutt (who has written two excellent noir novels) loading up a rented truck with me, driving to Princeton, NJ, picking up an Internet Archive Scribe Scanner, and hauling it the 100+ miles back to my house.

And then putting it in my house.

So that’s right, my house is about to become an Internet Archive Scanning Center.

Did you think I was messing around? 2013 is about getting it real.

I’m now coordinating with Internet Archive to get my scanning center set up and calibrated. At current expectations (mostly due to my doing significant travel in February), I expect this center to begin scanning in March 2013.

I am Internet Archive Poughkeepsie. Pleased to meet you.

Initially, I am learning to use the system, and will begin scanning some simple obscure book-format documents that have never seen the light of day. I have a gigantic shipping container in my back yard. I have plenty to pick from. I will then begin scanning whenever I have extra time.

Obviously, this will lead to underutilization. So here’s where you come in.

I want volunteers to come in and scan. I would love for them to scan material I have, as well as material they want to scan in that has meaning for them. I want to be able to reach out to a number of computer historical groups but I realize that if it turns out someone has a pile of old cookbooks from the old country, they might be better to scan as well.

I suspect I may have to ask for donations at some point, so we can pay for people staying in hotels or to help fix any parts that break, or so on. We’ll think about that. I don’t really want to do another kickstarter in the forseeable future.

So, you.

Are you interested in coming just outside Poughkeepsie, NY this year for a while, to scan? Are you interested in being involved in this? Can you help me find people? I can’t pay you – I am simply about to set it up that we can scan upwards of 800-1000 pages an hour of documents out there and, as I promised in the beginning of the year, change online computer history forever.

Want in?

3 Comments

My Buddy Aaron — January 13, 2013

My buddy Aaron Swartz hung himself on Friday.

Try to imagine a ball of energy, whipping around, looking for somewhere to strike, somewhere to hit, somewhere to find a stopping point or grand finale. Ultimately, just coming to a standstill because there’s just no real place to end up – a miserable standstill.

That’s me.

Us high-profile techie types are very good at jibber-jabber; fantastically good at it – that’s why you might hear of us in the first place. We’re good at bloviating paragraph after paragraph of warm syrupy context-aware verbiage into your screen to make you feel good an articulate person, out there, says things you like.

It will hopefully not be too much of a shock to you to know that some of your heroes don’t like each other too much. Hate, actually. But all-out fights don’t frequently happen because it rattles the audience a bit too much to see the knives come out not after some terrible adversary, but two people who they thought were compatriots on the same side.

Some of those heroes of yours, who I do not particularly like, have already written long things about Aaron. Most generally accurate from their perspective, a few are gleefully getting in the last word, a few are just demonstrating the aforementioned jibber-jabber proficiency.

So, if you didn’t know who Aaron Swartz was, I guarantee you could get a very large amount of information about him online. He did a lot of stuff. He did it very, very young and he died when he was 26, which is a good number to keep in the back of your head when you read how much he did. I don’t have the strength or energy to type “Aaron Swartz” into a search engine for you. If you don’t know him, go look at it.

We met because when I was Mr. Wikipedia Critic, Aaron did a simple programming process to evaluate the accuracy of a claim by Jimbo “Gasbag” Wales. Showing up a pompous doof with actual numbers and pushing those out got my attention, and Aaron and I connected; this was an asshole I could get behind. By this time, of course, he was an old hand at these sorts of things and I was on my own trajectory. But we got along. I followed his tricks and journeys whenever they got in my headlights, which was infrequently, due to my mostly making documentaries. I had no idea he was just 20.

When the indictment silliness came down, I got in on trying to be a voice of “pshaw” with him, providing what amount of support and perspective I could. Unfortunately, I missed his writings about being depressed or I’d have gotten right in there.

I lost a month at 21. Something hit me during my senior year in college. I literally did not leave my apartment for a month; I just lay there, occasionally used a BBS or two, mostly slept. I didn’t know why and when I returned to my classes I’d actually forgotten where half of them were held. Some of the teachers let me by, thankfully, but others held firm and I ended up taking a course in that summer to finally graduate. I can’t for the life of me tell you why that happened. But it did.

I had a half-hearted suicide attempt at 24. Quarter-hearted, really. It was just something to do when I was feeling particularly unhappy about where my life was. Obviously it didn’t take and I’m still around, fuckers. (For the curious, method: exposure to cold).

So I’d probably have tuned my message a bit more. His Skype name turned green a bunch of times and I said hello and told him I’d bake a cake for him with a file in it. I’ve had a couple young friends go to jail for a while due to computer stuff – it was rough but they’re back, maybe less likely to visit The Pirate Bay these days.

But my message for him was one of love and support, to ride it out, to know the wheels of the courts grind slow and fine and THAT’s how you get sad. I said these exact words to him and I know it because I still have our skype chats. Here’s the last of them.

[9/13/2012 11:54:04 AM] Aaron Swartz: HAPPY BIRTHDAY and many more YOU LOOK GOOD IN A WHITE SUIT and have developed an interesting alternative to the period
[9/13/2012 11:56:45 AM] Jason Scott: And you’re not in download jail yet! And that’s a big deal to me and one of the real presents.
[9/13/2012 11:58:15 AM] Jason Scott: So hugs to you
[9/13/2012 11:59:38 AM] Aaron Swartz: thanks. here’s hoping that’s true next year too
[9/13/2012 12:00:59 PM] Jason Scott: the court system is a screeching wheel grinding so slow and miserable that you don’t notice how the high pitch was there for a year when it stops where it does
[9/13/2012 12:02:09 PM] Jason Scott: I’ve been watching. And if you do get a jumpsuit in min sec I’ll drive out and visit often
[9/13/2012 12:02:49 PM] Jason Scott: You’re never alone!
[9/13/2012 12:12:51 PM] Aaron Swartz: Thanks, man. Much love.
[9/18/2012 1:34:04 PM] Jason Scott: Thick and thin, thick and thin. Let me know if I’m needed.
[10/23/2012 1:47:39 PM] Jason Scott: <3
[1/12/2013 9:47:24 AM] Jason Scott: Why?

My sadness at 21 and 24 is compounded when I have the rest of my life so far to look at – I joined Psygnosis, a dream come true, at 25. I started textfiles.com at 28. BBS Documentary filmed from 30-35. GET LAMP from 36-40. Wikipedia asshole critic at 32. Archive Team at 39. All these things I’d have missed.

So right now, I’m mostly sad – sad that Aaron played such a beautiful melody for the first third of his life, and won’t provide the harmonies for the rest.

But I’ll say one thing:

Yes, as mentioned, a lot of people now talking about Aaron are people I don’t like. But Aaron, you see…. Aaron treated us like a RAID setup – he saw past all our flaws and inconsistencies and brought out the best of what we were offering. For me, he pinged me about my warrior spirit and ways to make a difference and what was going wrong out there. For others, he found other qualities to pull from. We all had issues, but he just worked on things to make things better.

So while I have no idea, short of a to-be-discovered directive from him, of what he really might have wanted from me from this point on, I know what it’s going to be.

To persist. And to fight. And to remember.

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Documenting it at MAGfest — January 9, 2013

I attended MAGfest this past weekend. It’s a festival with thousands of people, held in the Northern Virginia/Maryland area, and packed with music, anime and videogames. Lots of videogames.

It was also the first Games on Film festival, where a film I made (GET LAMP), a film I edited (Going Cardboard), and a pile of other movies and documentaries were shown. I’ll talk about them in a moment.

When I wasn’t up in the room with the festival, I was spending time down in the Arcade, which was a beautiful room filled with over a hundred arcade machines. I took some footage for background footage for the Arcade documentary, using the really nice camera setup the kickstarter paid for. Here’s some screengrabs from that footage:

It’s a nice feeling when you’re no longer spending time being concerned about this flaw or that error, and just enjoying the way the footage came out. Most of this was filmed in the early morning hours, when things get loud and spectacularly crazy. A truly productive filming run.

No dates on when the Arcade Documentary will go from in-production to editing, but thanks to this great festival, I can tell you about a few documentaries worth checking out now or in the near future.

First, I saw an in-progress rough cut of Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time, which focuses on arcade collecting and the motivations and expressions of that. I could tell it was a rough cut just by the amount of additional footage the director had in there that would inevitably cut out – but it was enjoyable footage regardless. Here’s a trailer for the film:

You might wonder what my thoughts would be on seeing a film covering something that one of my own documentaries is filming. To be honest, it was initially mixed, but quickly went to gratefulness as I saw what worked, visually, and ways to cover the subject that the film hadn’t and that I knew I could. I actually came away more energized, to be honest. Jeff Von Ward has put together an ambitious work, which looks to be released this year. Looking forward to the final cut.

Martin Touhey showed some new footage from his in-production documentary Inside the Dragon’s Lair, a meditation and study of the story of the Dragon’s Lair laserdisc videogame. I had a great lunch with him, and bless him, he’s already nailed some fantastic interviews, like Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. I have great faith this one’s going to come out and cover Dragon’s Lair wonderfully. He’s got a kickstarter in his future and plans for a 2014 release.

The most unexpected of these new films (to me) had to be Beyond the Game, which was done by a group calling itself Animatronic Ackbar. There’s a trailer from a year ago out, and I’m sure they’ll have another out soon:

As a dark horse contender for my attention, this film blew me away, because I did not expect anyone to take on the subject matter this film does – nothing less than the entirety of the effect of gaming culture in every walk of young life. We see chiptune artists, 8-bit art shows, game competitions, cosplay, arcades, consoles, artwork, historical and celebrity figures who game… even circuitbending. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot more. This thing was truly epic. I look forward to it, later this year.

Three of the other films, I’d seen before, but it was a pleasure to check them out.

One was Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, a brilliantly-edited film about the game of Tetris (primarily for Nintendo, but with other platforms making appearances) and the people who have mastered them, all around the framework of the first world Tetris competition in many years. This film is a clockwork-snappy, top-notch sports film, making the audience smarter and super-aware of the effort going on in this game. It’s a miracle of inclusion and explanation, wrapped in a jaw-dropping story of a life defined and then broken away from the game of Tetris. I can’t recommend it enough.

Another was a showing of Indie Game the Movie, and I’ve said enough to you how much I love that goddamned thing. If you want to hear me love the filmmakers on stage for an hour, just go over here. Anyway, I saw it again. It’s just as good.

Finally, I saw the very-newly released Mojang: The Story of Minecraft. This is an expertly-filmed work about the runaway success of Minecraft and the effect it has on its designer and the company he builds to support it. I almost feel bad sounding so bland, but it’s just good. It’s solid. I have never played Minecraft, and I found their explanation and the collecting of the story of this magical game expertly put together for me to realize how much of a success this has been, and who Notch as a person is, as he confronts the kind of windfall and celebrity that few of us will ever have to know. I feel like they don’t even need my seal of approval – the movie is out there and it’s a hit.

A weekend of documentaries, a pile of films inspiring to my documentary craft, and a room downstairs with dozens of videogames? And I’m not dead?

I’ll take it.

Thanks, MAGfest, and thanks to Chad Williams for curating Games on Film. Loved it.

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