ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Spoiler Alert for 2013 —

Since I joined the Internet Archive, my big deal has been dumping in as much data as possible into their significant and notable archives – with so much disk space and with my having so much stuff at arm’s reach, it hasn’t been too hard, either. Besides the Archive Team collection, which is rather large but mostly user-generated content and meant for historical purposes, there’s been a wide swath of material, notably the computer magazines and technical videos as well as a huge amount of manuals and, oh yeah, all of the Internet Underground Music Archive.

2013 is another deal entirely, and here’s the plan.

It was pretty trivial to take stuff already up, already scanned, already extant, and shove it into the Internet Archive. I’ve done that, to the tune of about 80 or 90 terabytes of data. That was easy.

In 2013, I am aiming to expand out to items that are NOT online, and sitting in my physical world.

To that extent, I’ll be setting up stations for magnetic and optical media ingestion, as well as a book scanning station, and will begin the process of blowing in as much material as possible. My goal is to have a truckload of paper material scanned in, as well as a good few wheelbarrows of CD-ROMs and magnetic media. You’ll get access to it all, I promise.

And then I’ll be donating stuff.

It has been interesting for people to find out I might give stuff away – to them, they have the image of me being the last port of call for all manner of material, which really was never my intention – I just intended to ensure it wouldn’t be destroyed and that it would ultimately find a good home.

They’re rare, but I’ve found some places that are good homes, good PERMANENT, WELL-FUNDED, RESPECTFUL homes that will enable people far beyond me to access them. The shipping container in the back yard is a great place, but not all of it really needs to be there – professional archives are waiting for them and it’ll ensure a person who wants to study them can come to them anytime and begin studying. That’s not the case here and I doubt I’ll be that place anytime in the near or distant future.

Now, be clear – I am not sending anything that isn’t scanned in, transferred, or otherwise available. It doesn’t leave without getting online for you, for me, for permanence. And I have so much stuff that has never seen the light of day.

But the time has come – respect has come to computer history from the 1970s-1990s and I intend to both get it under protection and to bring duplicates online. It’s time.

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Kickstarter in Autumn —

So I told you how great Kickstarter is, as well as my experiences running various Kickstarters, and now I’ll close this out with a tale of despair and decay – just the kind of story arc I love.

Let’s run through the allegiances and connections one more time, in case people are seeking some easy excuse not to read this text waterfall. I have met the founders of Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler and Perry Chen, on multiple occasions but mostly in the context of them doing meet and greets and so I’m hardly to be considered a buddy. I’ve been to the Kickstarter offices a couple times, once for a party and twice for an event around a kickstarter campaign that went well. I’ve run three kickstarters – all were successful, which has bought me a lot of attention and occasional “heeeeeellllp” style letters that ask me to sprinkle magic knowledge dust on an attempt to raise crazy bucks. Because of those letters, I’ve been an adviser of some capacity to probably two dozen other campaigns, although in no situation have I taken money or compensation for doing so – I just like talking a lot.

I’m also into computer history, and computer history often ends up morphing into Corporate History, since so much of the computer experience has been forming companies great and small to get these industrial items into as many hands as possible. So the historical arc of Kickstarter interests me as much as the things that come from its campaigns. All of what I’m saying here is the typical pseudo-prescient blather that issues forth from the likes of Dave Winer or Robert Scoble or Doc Searls on one of his wistful days, and should be taken that way.

Onward.

Nothing lasts forever. Everything decays and changes and morphs, and when you take this inevitable situation as something that can be subdued with makeup and surgery, ugliness results. Telling yourself you’re different and maybe even staking your existence on that impossible claim leads to downfall and suicide.

What Kickstarter did was something new with something basic. Through an intense twee design and verbiage that was inclusive and distinct, they re-engineered human kindness and artistic patronage into a combination of a casual game and a “best-of” weblog. Initially they did it with an invite-only party, where only friends of friends made the campaigns, but that understandable trial period has long given way to a cascade of projects, intentions and products that you can browse quickly and cleanly, and receive well-geared come-ons that go to a general audience and not to, say, your kitchen and your brother shaking his fists at the sky about how everyone is going to eat lamb pops in three months and just $50,000 would get him at the top of that heap. For that, they have made something very special, something very well created indeed, and the cargo cult sites have popped up like mushrooms, and Kickstarter has received the ultimate linguistic honors – it is a verb, an adjective, a placeholder noun.

Let us pause, as people so often forget to do, to acknowledge how well that has gone.

Let us consider, in point of fact, how compulsive and alluring the Narrative is now. The Narrative is that if you cogently describe your dream, use the skills of your descriptive writing and your well-honed pitch to fill out some blank forms at Kickstarter, and if the smiling 20-somethings in a building in the NY area hit “Approve”, you could find yourself with the needed funds to make that dream happen.

I remember, like it wasn’t over a decade ago, a documentary I saw that interviewed 4 old men about their history, but one died during the multi-year fundraising campaign, so all we saw was a shot of the other three men holding a photo of their lost comrade. I was angry at the filmmaker for not doing something, anything to get the man’s story down, but I was also ambiently angry at a situation where years had to pass between dream and funding. With things like Kickstarter, that period goes down to weeks.

So let us remember what there was before, and how much good has come out of this company and this dream.

…and now, the darkness to come.

Deep underneath Kickstarter, flowing as surely as blood flows in a heart, is money. Maybe that’s not exactly an obscure or unexpected observation, but life and success sometimes misdirects the forces at work. Kickstarter is Money. Requests for money, offers for money, counting of money, a goal of money with progression towards that money goal in increments of money. It’s right there, everywhere. There’s not a page on there that doesn’t mention cash.

There’s no path where this is going to change, nor is it really sensical to. But making that sort of bargain, to rest a business of loans and contribution in the warm clothes of friendship, art, and hope – it has brought great joy but it can’t last. You will not recognize Kickstarter within two years and you will absolutely not recognize Kickstarter in five, assuming there is a Kickstarter to not recognize.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how much desperation and insidiousness money can bring along, especially “real” money that has now begun to flock and flow into Kickstarter’s campaigns. The first hundred-thousand campaign got attention – the first million-dollar campaign got a champagne celebration that raved on as the second million-dollar campaign hit. Million-dollar payouts are a musk that bring out the worst of human nature, from regions and places of darkness that are not to be trifled with.

Overdramatic? I don’t think so – searching the news archive for phrases like “murdered over” gets you some insight into the human condition over things a lot less compelling than a million dollars.

So with a jar of honey thrown into the Pit of Bears, it’s Kickstarter’s game to lose. The question that remains is what they can do to protect themselves against this rising tide of chicanery and greed. Go too suspicious and paranoid and block out income. Continue at the current rate, and in comes The Full Con.

I am positive, as much as I am willing to be, that someone somewhere has rented an office and begun the careful, involved process of building a backstory and a history for their non-existent endeavor. This endeavor will come at you with the warm, smiling pitch of the talented grifter, with an answer for everything and a dream that’s just this side of crazy and therefore that side of compelling. They’ll have domains, a website, a phone number. They’ll give you a feeling of being at the start of something great. And you are. You most certainly are.

But that one big grift, when it happens, will make news but not be the end of things. It’s the endless smaller grifts and failures that add up – stories where people who are always looking for something to grouse about and will jump on any sorrow conducted through a wire will have 1000 words before the horror of the marks have even begun to sink in.

With each one, comes a clampdown – a decision to get out of risky issues, to get away from things more trouble than they’re worth. Already, there are dozens of seemingly arbitrary rewards now verboten on Kickstarter. Soon there will be dozens more.

I’m not down on Kickstarter – Kickstarter is a wonderful thing and we have many dreams to live with before things are beyond saving. And it won’t be a bustling office in Brooklyn one day and an empty shell the next – it doesn’t go that way with ideas that are truly executed as well as they have. But Autumn is coming. Until the cool winds blow, please enjoy the summer days. They have been wonderful.

Now, who’s for lemonade?

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Kickstarter in Summer —

I wrote an entry about Kickstarter from the point of view of a person starting or running a campaign, and I’ve talked to a lot of people in podcasts and other venues about it, all from the same point of view. Now, let me talk about it as a backer.

I got into Kickstarter early, way early, when it was friends of friends of friends all getting into the precious hipster sleepover of this new big-text-and-white-space fundraising site. It had the sheen of planning about it, of people sitting up late nights arguing at a big screen with prototype layouts and crazy fonts and wanting it to welcome people into the idea of throwing down to make stuff happen. It was very nice. (And psst, very well funded on the back end. They had room to grow.)

The project ideas were generally kind of benign, little twee plans to put on something that needed a few hundred dollars, or heaven forbid a couple thousand, and if we all threw 15 or 20 bucks at it, there we’d go. It was 2009, a lot of online life was pretty ruined but hacked-in poop in browser rendering engines made it all seem like it was going to get better. And kickstarter seemed, for what it was, another cute little idea with lots of design packed into it and a bright future for doing some silly projects here and there.

I ran a few campaigns over the years. Again, this entry is not about that.

No, it’s about the 71 campaigns I was a backer in. Here’s my profile with the record of that. If you start to study it, some sort of personality profile comes out of it. Let me spoil it for you. Here’s what I like:

  • Stuff that is put up by one of my buddies. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

It’s hard to take my judgement seriously about them – they’re my buddies! My buddies can do no wrong, that’s why they’re my buddies. If your buddy needs $20 because they’re going to go down to home depot and build an entirely ill-advised sled that has a couch on it, well heck! Why not! Send me a video of you with a broken neck! I’ll even pay a little extra to have my name stitched into the couch, so the cops know who to call when the find the pile!

Now, I’m lucky – I have some talented buddies. But even if they were doomey doom doomed, I’d still support them.

  • Crazy-ass documentaries on crazy-ass subjects. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 etc.

As someone who makes crazy-ass documentaries, I appreciate the investment of time, money, sanity and misery that accompanies making a film about something based in reality and which is fluid and flexible in its concoction and implementation. Oh, man, the years it takes to do a decent one! The endless “almost dones” followed by “aw, shit, our sound mix is ass” or “oh no, we need more footage of the main dude to make it all make sense now that he just quit his job”. It’s a thankless iceberg of sad drudge with a tiny cold point of glory sticking out of the water. You bet I’ll throw $50 their way (or more) and then wait, very very very patiently, for the film to come out a notable number of years later.

  • “Everyone else is doing it, how can I not”. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Can’t help it, in this case. I see people piling onto a project, waving money, watching the amount slamming up into insane heights, and I have to throw in a ticket just to be around for the really big show. The show might be an explosion or it might be the final cosmic key that takes us all to a pan-dimensional orgasmic space-time utopia. Don’t care. Just want to be there when it happens.

  • Oh, what the hell! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I didn’t know I even WANTED this stuff until 30 seconds before I clicked the Back This Project button. I looked at it, went “huh”, and slapped the big green love letter and became a backer. I didn’t need the stuff, I didn’t necessarily want this so badly I couldn’t imagine life without it, but damn… while they’re handing this out, sign me up for one.

Now, what’s the one thing all of these have in common? All of them?

My fucking ATTITUDE.

Every time I clicked that button, I knew what I was doing – I was saying “yeah, toss me in for it”. You see, I’ve been alive for a while. I know that I get into the car with my buddy to help him buy a TV, we might not come home with a TV and in fact we might not get back until tomorrow. (But what a story!) I know that if I back a documentary about a guy and his dream of a balloon chair, I might get a supreme oscar winner in the mail down the road, or I might get a bunch of explanations that the guy died and we’re sorry, everyone, and the raw footage is going somewhere.

Every one of these, every one of them, is me putting money into a jar along with a scrawled note saying SEND IT HERE IF YOU FINISH IT, screwing the lid on, and tossing it into the river. I don’t care if it was my best buddy saying he needed to raise $100 for cookies or someone promising a massively multi-million-dollar-funded AAA game that sends strip-o-grams to your door for life. Every single one was a crap shoot. This was a delightful game of roulette with everything on black and just spinning the wheel.

That’s how I went in.

What have I gotten from it? A lot of amazing.

In my high school, I was in a band, and at one point we had a guest player on a song, a bassist who could not be beat and who kicked ass. His name was Ted Kamp, and 20 years later he did a kickstarter to finish his album. He finished it. I got what I was told he was going to do, some fantastic music, and a personalized autograph saying things had come a long way from the high school days. And they had! Within a month after that, he was playing with a band on the Tonight Show. He’s toured. Fuck yeah!

One of the most fascinating stories to me in animation is the weird history of the Thief and the Cobbler, Richard Williams’ masterpiece that he spent over 20 years on and which collapsed and was shoved out the door heavily butchered. I thought I knew the story, but I wasn’t sure. And so a documentary came up for funding about it, and I dropped money in. I later heard there was a sneak screening at the director’s college, and the college happened to be 10 miles from my house. I shot down there, got right in the middle of the front row, and I got the whole story, director’s long cut version, of the history of this film. Amazing. AMAZING. Now it’s playing film festivals.

My name is on a plaque on the side of a typecasting machine in Portland. It’s in the instruction manual for an Atari 2600 port of Star Castle. It’s in the credits of a nice handful of amazing, released films.

And in my house are DVDs, albums, posters, and bric-a-brac from all sorts of dreams coming true.

Kickstarter has been very, very good for me.

Have some of these trees not borne fruit? Oh, sure! My favorite was one documentary where the editor and director left the project and wrote to tell us this, oh, six months later. (On the other hand, production seems to be going on.) In the 71 backed projects are a handful of ones that are little tombstones marking projects in dormancy or maybe just deep slumber. Some of them, I paid for it to go a certain way, and it has, but there weren’t any rewards, so I just paid and that was kind of where the work ended. (I’m fine with this.)

But you know, it comes back to that attitude.

Somewhere between 2009 and 2012, Kickstarter went from being a site to being a fucking VERB. People who I wouldn’t imagine do much browsing at all talk about kickstarting something near me, or running a kickstarter. I’ve seen it be lauded, analyzed, held up, knocked down. It’s just THERE now. It’s gone huge, as huge as it could possibly go for the moment, but they’re definitely keeping an eye on things.

I’ve spent time with founder Perry Chen, with founder Yancey Strickler, with other employees and planners of Kickstarter. These are bright, energetic people making magic happen. Magic has happened. I have been in dark rooms watching movies on subjects I could never have dreamed would get such coverage, I’ve been at events and listened to music and worn the watch and put on the t-shirt.

Am I a fan? Ya fuckin’ THINK?

But here’s the thing.

At the end of the day, Kickstarter is about money. Oh, sure, it’s about community and support and hugs and unicorn snuggles, but it’s about money. Money to projects that need it. Money invested in these projects. Money spent, money tracked, money returning results. And so it will always be. The next entry on Kickstarter will cover that.

But of all the weird unexpected results to come from the Kickstarter miracle, I’ve been rather surprised how much a secondary equation has entered the mix – one I could never have planned for.

People. People are dicks.

I mean, make no mistake, I knew people were dicks. Along my many travels, I’ve seen lots of dicky people being dicks. I’d be in the middle of some awesome post on a vintage computing forum or in the comments after a news story of meaning and import to me, and there come the dicks. Woo hoo! A bushel of dicks just being POURED on the situation, right where they’re never wanted to needed. But that was more about going “well, lie down with dicks, wake up sticky”.

No, what’s amazing is Kickstarter is to dicks what bright bug zappers are to moths.

I have a confession. Some of my kickstarters? I invested in them, just a bit, to keep up on the assholes.

You see, if you support a kickstarter campaign, when they post an update, you’ll be notified. The e-mail’s even clickable. And so I have a handful of these campaigns where the only reason I am backing them is so I can be notified to run on down to see what these assholes said TODAY.

Because I knew, no matter what the person posted, no matter how positive and forward looking and on-track and amazing, you’d get a nice big ol’ dick sandwich in the comments. Without fail! And if you want to keep on the cutting edge of assholes, it helps to spend time near an asshole attractor.

Kickstarter’s design, purpose, and dream all attract assholes. It’s in the DNA. They will never be rid of them. It can’t be undone, just like no matter what restaurant you run, how clean, how special, someone is still going to just boot puke buckets in the bathroom. You can mitigate it, you can try to keep on top of it, but the fact is, it’s dicks all the way down.

Some of my favorite dickstarters:

  • Cigar-chomping, Uncle (or Aunt) Moneybags demanding answers, goddamnit it, answers who “invest” $20 into something and then act like they just backed up a dumpster of cash into someone’s basement. Feature demands, time demands, back-of-the-envelope calculations that they preach and bray about like they’re hard-won economic forecasts. Threats of withdrawing their Andrew Jackson if they don’t get a rundown right now, because they shouldn’t endure this economic hardship without a proper prospectus for this cupcake-baking machine someone is making. What kills me is that this manner of asshole is a given in the film and game industries, but those people are providing tens or hundreds of millions and so the ‘creative’ has to sit there in the chair and quietly take this strap-on because it will lead to the good of the project and the lives of the crew and potential riches and awards down the line. It’s a terrible position to be in, but it’s the reality when so much is on the line. Not so much if you’re waving a $50 like it’s made of hand-spun gold, dick. Throw the cash down and shut up.
  • The Technicals. Oh, man, the back-seat engineers and wizards of scientific majesty who get an update or a clarification and start their responses with “Disappointed that….”, followed by the sound of a penguin farting. You didn’t use linux! What about doubling the RAM! How can I be expected to expand this board when you have this style of port! What contingencies have you made for the Chinese manufacturing holiday! This isn’t the shade of red I ordered! (That one actually happened – someone hit the roof because they believed the shade of red had “shifted” from the original mockups and OH MAN it was like someone had shredded their newborn.) The technicals are great because they can endlessly complain without that whole scary “running the project” aspect.
  • The Recent Graduates from the Hari Seldon School for Knowing What’s Happening Next. Don’t worry, kickstart organizer – if you delay for any period of time, or provide any number of details, just lean back and let this class of person step right in and predict the whole thing for you. They’ll explain how long you’ll take, why you’re doing it wrong and what would make it work better, and best of all, fill all the details in comments for all the other backers, because someone appointed you the Grand Vizer of the project and you’re the one standing at the balcony letting  the crowd know what the real story is, like some errant scandal sheet column.
  • The fallen angels who have have the veil ripped from their eyes. Oh, my most special favorite; the people who write things like “After funding this kickstarter and finding (delay/changes/cancellation/rebooting), I am seriously disappointed and this really costs my faith in kickstarter.” Oh, the pain, the misery, your investment you made freely may not have worked out. Meanwhile you paid $10 for a shitty popcorn 4 times this year and not once did you prostrate at the ticket taker about your shattered love of cinema.” Poetry is the watchword: one person I encountered wrote “this really killed my kickstarter fire.” WHAT EXACTLY IS THE FUEL FOR A KICKSTARTER FIRE

Dicks all the way down! And like I said, there’s some projects I join just to watch them in action. They remind me how much I hate people, but something positive too.

It reminds me that when things go right, when people are not boneheads, when your supporters and fans and friends and family treat you with respect and dignity, it’s not a given, it’s not even the odds-on favorite. It’s a precious show that you, the person getting such support and respect, should recognize and appreciate. I have been so goddamned lucky with my campaigns – so much support, so much assistance, so much eternal love coming from so many quarters and distances. It’s been a joy and it will continue to be a joy. Thanks to every, absolutely every single one of you.

And that’s Kickstarter, in the summer of its life.

I’ll discuss the autumn another time.

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The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History —

Folks, I’ve said I’m not a fan of Wikipedia for nearly ten years now. I used to mention it in presentations until I found that eighteen-year-olds would confront me at the end, like I spoke out against oxygen or wearing socks. So I don’t mention it much anymore and generally, it doesn’t come up. They got a little better on some quarters anyway, and so it’s not a complete doomed airship, just one that lists poorly to one side now and then.

But every once in a while, something really stupid happens on Wikipedia, and by once in a while I mean every single goddamned day, and occasionally it’s so “really stupid” someone thinks they have to summon me like I’m Odin and Ragnarök just popped out of the Advent calendar. “Do something”, they say, or maybe something more along the lines of “You should see this”, because if you’re Ralph Nader what you really want to do is witness car crashes.

There’s the internal politicking stupid, which is boring these days, and there’s the “inaccurate howler lives on for months” stupid, which is fleetingly entertainment. Luckily nobody thinks to drag me to those tailgate parties.

No, the big one is “some numbnut gang has decided Wikipedia doesn’t need entries on this this week.”

Now, call me an old-fashioned kinda archiving guy, but keeping stuff around is, on the whole, a good thing. It’s especially a good thing if what’s being kept around is obviously the hard work of dozens or even hundreds of people contributing time and knowledge to make something better. Hey, put down the pitchforks, Charlie. I’m just saying, here. You come up against something that’s obviously got some weight and effort, your first thought isn’t to toss it into the compactor.

Yet all the time, some people get together and think “this entry… I’ve never heard of it… I just did a cursory search and it’s not [made up criteria]. Into the bonfire with you, obscuro!” and then they do that little kangaroo court thing with the Articles for Deletion.

If you don’t know what the whole Article for Deletion thing on Wikipedia is…. great. I mean, just walk away. You don’t need to know exactly what shoegazer crapsongs the pimply-faced badass down the street listens to when he’s tagging your garage door, either. You will not be a better person for it.

But the upshot is that pretty much anybody can get together with as little as 2 other people and decide, across a seven day period, to delete an article. This happens all the time. It’s despicable.

No, don’t jump on my shit by comparing it to normal pruning of vandalism articles or self-promotional spam. We’re talking articles where they’ve been around for years, and people do an AfD, and kill it, or even worse, nominate it over and over, every few months, until at one point they’ve won. See, that’s the brilliance of it: People who are guardians of an article have to defend it over and over, always doing their best to “win”, while the fucks just have to nominate it over and over and win ONCE, and then the article is blown off the face of the earth.

None of this is new. I’ve talked about this before.

What happens in the realm of “let’s go rattle Jason’s tree about this” is that occasionally some weasel on Wikipedia will decide to go after a thematic purge. They decide to go after, say, everything related to famous trailer parks, or infamous London criminals, or anything where they can go plonk, plonk, plonk, right down the line.

And one of the big punching bags is anything related to BBS history.

See, when you’re a a puffy-fingered bureaucrat tapping away from your incredible younger-than-my-shoes point of view, BBS history just tends to fall under “who GIVES a shit”. You find a lack of citation of it, make some wild-ass judgement about whether it was “relevant”, and even if the information is sourced and valid to a small extent considering the scant available material online, you go ahead and just knock that shit out.

So they do this, and then I end up with friends and fans coming to me to tell me what’s going on.

The most recent casualty is Space Empire Elite, a perfectly fine and relevant BBS Door Game that lived a happy life of a few years ago. Pre-web, really, and not ported to some modern flash or html5 equivalent, so not, you know, hitting Reddit every 12 seconds. So it got the boot.

Benj Edwards did a perfectly fine mention of this and a call to arms. He has all the gory details I can barely bring together the energy to peruse, much less summarize.

Anyway, here’s where I diverge from a lot of people.

Fuck Wikipedia.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck Wikipedia.

See, the problem is that people think of wikipedia as a SOURCE. It’s NOT a source. It’s REALITY SLASH FICTION.

You’ve got people randomly making up what they think is important and then writing whatever, day in and day out, and then being able to mess with everyone ELSE’s idea of what’s important, and then everyone can stomp around everyone else’s sand castle until either a topic is so boring and obscure nobody else wants to touch it, or they lock the thing down and flip out if anyone messes with it, especially if that subject or person is in the news. In some cases, the article is in a state of flux constantly – not one of improvement, just churn – endless rewriting and twiddling that doesn’t really do much except let the next person get in there and pee on the hydrant from a slightly different angle. Everybody is a hero. Everybody is the final Grand Poobah of You Get To Stay, and they can adjust their little antler hat and hit the delete button all day long. Life is cheap in Wikipedia, and ideas even cheaper; effort the cheapest of all.

So fuck ’em.

For years I’ve taken the following groundbreaking approach with BBS history: Snag as much of it as I can from as many sources as I can. Pull together data and documents that are insights into what happened. Interview people who were there. Transfer video recordings and audio recordings and scan documents and make it all into online actuality. You can debate the notability of Space Potato BBS all day, or you can scan and transfer all the Space Potato BBS material and put it somewhere where we don’t get a straw poll every harvest moon to decide to burn it to the ground.

Oh, the faces of the Wiki-faithful when I’m like this in person (and I am, in fact, like this in person). The concerned and sourpuss face when they mention something about Wikipedia and my response is fundamental distaste. The dropped mouth, the sad eyes – it’s like eating delicious key lime pie to me. Seriously: Have fun all day, folks, but I’m not going to put on the party hat and act like this birthday cake isn’t full of horse poop. Nice decorations, though.

No, the solution is to stop thinking of Wikipedia as the Source, the Big Stage, the Final Arbiter. It will fail at this and it will always fail at this as long as people get to undo the work of many others merely by being a persistent keyboard-pushing douchebag. Even on Reddit, when someone informed or at least long-winded and opinion-filled shows up, they can only downvote them into greyness, not delete them entirely.

No, primary sources. Mark my words. 2013 is the year I am scanning and duping in terabytes, terabytes of BBS and home computer material. Trust me – the world is going to get a lot more of what happened in that period.

Let Wikipedia do an article on THAT, is my advice. We’ll get by until then.

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Missing in Action: 8-Bit Generation Documentary —

 

 

UPDATE: Please read this later entry for update on this documentary.

I’m putting this here to get some attention.

There’s a documentary in production, or which was in production, which was a mini series about all things 8-bit consoles and computers. It’s called “8 Bit Generation”. It has trailers up. The trailers are fairly incredible.

 

These trailers are so nice looking, so well shot, so beautiful and so filled with KILLER interviews, I nearly quit documentary filmmaking when I saw them – someone was doing things a billion times better than I could ever do. I emotionally recovered.

These fellows traveled the world and got all sorts of amazing subjects. Among the ones that blew me away was an actual interview with Jack Tramiel. I’d tried – he’d turned me down. And he’s gone, people. This interview they have is it.

So, in 2011 they put up a trailer, and some of the music they had wasn’t cleared, so they took those down and put up new, cleared trailers. Good enough, although that does mean a lot of articles on them point to the missing Vimeo links. But rest assured, things were looking good. They had a website, you could order stuff, you could see how they were going to have a deluxe version (which I ordered) and a whole bunch of features.

This thing looked AWESOME.

And then, poof.

Here’s the website as it used to look. It’s gone now.

They are missing in action. Totally gone. The domain has a year to expire, but there’s no website for it.

Zoe Blade, who has done a bunch of soundtrack work with me, did the soundtrack work with the documentary as well. She’s gone ahead and put the Soundtrack Album up for sale. Take a listen, it’s fantastic stuff.

Now, I’m a realistic guy. I deal with people working on documentaries for years and there’s ups and downs the whole way. It’s kind of The Deal. One of the facts is everything takes longer than it should – the making, the editing, the packaging, the finishing. It just does.

I keep track of a few dozen projects out there. Some take a long time, some go dormant, some live again. I got it.

But this one… this one was special. Unique interviews with unique people. This was going to be a blockbuster.

Guys? Everything OK? Need help?

UPDATE: Through various channels, I am told that the current situation is one edited episode and some potential financial issues with getting the film done. I continue to offer my support in finishing this film, and wish the producers the best in bringing the project to fruition.

34 Comments

The Holiday Hard Drive (Donate to Internet Archive, Please) —

The short form of this post is that I and Archive Team would like to ask you to donate money to the Internet Archive. During the month of December, they’ve got a 3-1 matching partner, which means that every dollar you donate results in $4 going to the Internet Archive’s funds. That is unbeatable and if you want to support what Archive Team is doing and support the Internet Archive at the same time, you will not. find. a better. deal.

So, the great news: Archive Team has been KICKING ASS. This band of people are pretty much an establishment now, with various sub-groups doing daily, hourly work to rescue at-risk websites, retrieve lost data, change the regard of user-generated content, and even get in the face of people with influence and decision-making and make them change long-held beliefs. We are doing really well.

Among our greatest additions is the Archive Team Warrior, a virtual machine that runs on a bunch of platforms and produces an easy-to-use, fast, and well-coordinated effort to download the entire content of a website. It’s friendly, it’s beautiful, and oh man, does it work.

Seriously – this thing is a monster. It took us 9 months to download all of Geocities, which was roughly one terabyte of data. Now, we can run through with this distributed preservation of service of attack and download many sites within a week or month that dwarf Geocities handily. And it’ll be in REALLY nice shape, REALLY great integrity.

The way this system works, the client machines shove them into a buffer box (or buffer boxes) and then those finalized packs of downloaded website information is stored at the Internet Archive. Here’s the Archive Team Collection at Internet Archive.

We have been rescuing a LOT of data, people. We’re past 320 terabytes.

THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TERABYTES OF HISTORY, OF USERS, OF LIVES.

That’s a big deal. And so big, it got on the Internet Archive’s radar, as in “blip, that’s a lot of data you just uploaded”. And yeah, it is! 320 terabytes is, by any current standard, nothing to sneeze at. By our estimation, it represents over 4 million user accounts spread across dozens of now-defunct services and sites.

And as of this month, they’re showing up in the Wayback machine. The Internet Archive is now putting up the newest load, with over 10 Petabytes of web history and media available which includes 240 billion website snapshots. The vast majority of Archive Team downloads are going to be up on the new Wayback machine, meaning those sites that were referenced by others will return. Fun fact: When Geocities went down, Wikipedia had over 100,000 links to Geocities sites for their citations. Wiped out in a night.

We continue to monitor the world and bring in data by the truckload and the Internet Archive has been kind enough to host that data. Without questioning it. Without complaining.

Now it’s time to pay back.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit (that, I disclose, I work for as a “free-range archivist”) that has, since the mid-90s, provided many petabytes and millions of items for free, to the world, to better the world along the way. Movies, radio, books, TV news, software, you name it… the Internet Archive has it, and continues to make it go for everyone. Every day, every night, with an eye on “forever” as a goal, and not just “until we try to sell you an upgrade” or “until we’re bought by someone else”. It’s a library and an archive and it just kicks ass.

Archive Team alone is costing the Internet Archive tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a cold hard fact – we’re doing the work that companies should be doing themselves, and Internet Archive has taken that brunt. But there’s good news.

First, they take tax-deductible donations. A big win right there.

Next, a partner has come forward to do 3-1 donation matching for December 2012. It’s a holiday hard drive! Every dollar you donate results in $4 for the Internet Archive. I’d been dreaming up campaigns and kickstarters and a whole other range of potential fund-raisers, but the fact is, nothing I can come up with beats a 300% instant return on investment. Nothing.

So please do it. Here’s the breakdown of how Internet Archive spends that money:

Pretty much all this money goes into hard drives, and the hope is to raise enough money for 4 petabytes of disk space, which will wipe out Archive Team’s effect AND budget lots of space for next year.

This will really help us.

If you decide to do it (they take Amazon, Paypal and Bitcoin right from the site, and have a contact address for other methods), please leave a comment under here with your thoughts and support.

Thanks a lot.

 

12 Comments

What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor —

While doing some preliminary interview footage for the Arcade Documentary project, I asked a bunch of teenagers what most surprised them at the MAGFest pop-up arcade, where dozens of games of all stripe were right there ready to be played. To a person, it was one thing:

The vector monitor on Asteroids.

If you see Asteroids online, the “screen” probably looks like this:

That is, it’s a JPEG or PNG or whatever, with the source likely being an emulator of some sort. So everything is crisp, and rasterized, and generated as if were a screen map, that is, from the assumption that it’s a raster screen. Playing the emulator itself is similar – there it is on your recently-vintaged flatscreen, perfectly sharp, definitely of the modern desktop era.

When you see it in the arcade, an original Asteroids machine screen looks kind of like this:

The vector lines, which are created by aiming a beam DIRECTLY AT YOUR EYES only to be stopped by a coated piece of glass, have a completely different feel. The phosphor glows, the shots look like small stars floating across the glass, and a raster line is not to be seen. It’s an entirely different experience, and the teenagers at MAGfest had never seen it before, and unfortunately, it is well on its way out.

(It would be worth it for myself or someone else to do research into “so what is the deal with CRT and vector monitors these days”. Some other time.)

So there’s several ways to go about this “problem”, assuming you recognize it as a “problem” that various types of monitors are disappearing with great speed, every year. One is to hoard old monitors. This is short-sighted and doomed. Another is to forget those monitors never existed. On the plus side, not much energy is required to do that. But these monitors are worth remembering, and it’s certainly the case that the software was written with these old display devices in mind.

Enter geekery.

Originally, emulators were trying to adapt this old software to be useful or at least pretty to modern systems – so the efforts were around scaling and smoothing. I can’t find the at-arms’-reach citation for when this started, but it’s at least a decade old. You could choose to smooth, upscale and anti-alias the graphics for your now-kickass setup, historically wrecking the item, but making it a lot easier to look at. (If you want an earlier situation that’s the same, there’s the adventure of DOOM and OpenGL.)

But meanwhile, CRTs started falling out of favor in a big way, and slightly rounded glass screens and beige enclosures began falling in front of Plasma and LCD.

Ian Bogost used slave student labor and created a Television Simulator to work out some themes in the excellent Racing the Beam book about the Atari 2600’s programming and context. It really opens your eyes to see the difference between the “original” emulated image and the “CRT simulated” graphics:

Suddenly, it’s pretty clear how the perfection of emulation takes away a lot of the analog fog that made digital compelling in a certain way.

Now, not unexpectedly, people were not happy with this implementation, since it wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t flexible. So work continued.

Some time ago, I was shown this image in relation to efforts with simulating a CRT monitor:

We’re getting into the Twilight Zone of Maybe You Don’t See All This Shit Going On, and that’s entirely fine. For some folks, the binary situation of “I can see it / I can not see it” is quite enough – that things are emulated at all is the end of the story. But still, it is quite amazing to me to see such subtle aspects as the curve of the monitor, the glow of pixels against glass, and the bleeding of voltages and scan lines all being emulated in software (sometimes with graphics hardware doing some of the lifting). In fact, working this hard to make these graphics look slightly ‘bad’ is a ton of work.

There’s a bunch of advancement being done with this outlook, using the MAME and MESS emulators. The direct name for this particular project is HLSLMAME. There’s a thread of discussion here about it. (There’s another thread over here as well.)

The images of the screenshots have a haunting quality to them, old but not old. Perfect but imperfect. I really love looking at them.

For an extra bonus, I was sent a few videos of this software CRT emulation in action.

I’ve uploaded them to the Internet Archive, where you can check them out. While you can play them on the Internet Archive’s player, I would not recommend this – all the subtle changes to the video signal are just not as obvious through the compression. Pull down these tens-of-megabytes files and see the changes in the video look through the settings.

When you look at the example configuration files, you realize how much of a tweaker’s paradise this is:

hlsl_enable 1
hlslini %g
hlsl_prescale_x 4
hlsl_prescale_y 4
hlsl_preset -1
hlsl_write 
hlsl_snap_width 2560
hlsl_snap_height 2048
shadow_mask_alpha 0.00
shadow_mask_texture aperture.png
shadow_mask_x_count 320
shadow_mask_y_count 256
shadow_mask_usize 0.187500
shadow_mask_vsize 0.09375
curvature 0.02
pincushion 0.02
scanline_alpha 0.450000
scanline_size 1.25
scanline_height 0.750000
scanline_bright_scale 1.000000
scanline_bright_offset 0.750000
scanline_jitter 0.25
defocus 1.0,1.0
converge_x 0.0,0.0,0.0
...

….and so on. SO MUCH TWEAKING AND KNOBS. But it’s from this we can get some amazingly refined experiences and ideas.

This HLSLMAME thing is currently Windows only, and it’s a little involved to get running, but the point remains the same: this is valuable work, affecting perceptions of the software after its true mechanical components are gone off the earth.

There’s plenty of other aspects awaiting this effort, too: the sounds, the ambience, the buzzing of speakers and the hum of deflection coils. There’s been attempts to make controllers that act like the originals, and there’s always been some leaning towards getting the speed just exactly right, which is harder than it seems.

In all this, it’s the not wanting to lose something than many don’t even notice is lost that’s the critical move. It’s sometimes a bit too OCD and always a little annoying if it’s not that important to you, but realizing what, exactly, has changed for software makes bringing it back that much more likely. It’s a respect for the past beyond the idea of it. It’s messy and weird and geeky but that’s just the way I like it.

Here’s to terrible monitors!

thanks to DFJustin for his assistance

the lion’s share of programming of HLSLMAME is by Ryan Holtz / MooglyGuy

31 Comments

GET LAMP Raw Interviews Pretty Much Up —

An important milestone is finally here for GET LAMP: pretty much all the full interviews are now up on archive.org.

It was important to me, especially at the beginning, that GET LAMP bring into existence some long-form interviews with people who had been so influential in my life and so many others. The writers, coders and dreamers behind interactive fiction and text adventures were, on the whole, exactly what I hoped – brainy, clever, wry, thoughtful, and full of stories and memories. Naturally, the relatively short length of GET LAMP could never include all these statements in its space, and here we had easily over 100 hours of interviews sitting around in my hard drives.

In ye old days, documentary makers would record interviews and we’d never hear or see the full interviews ever again – if people were lucky, those tapes/reels might end up at some archive, or the person interviewed would be such a big deal later that it would be worth it to some crew to go over them again and re-use them elsewhere. Now, however, things are in much better shape, and now if you want to listen to Don Woods (co-creator of Adventure)  chat about why he did all this, or the poet Robert Pinsky talk about working with a 1980s software house, well, now is your big chance.

We’ve got modern interactive fiction writers, Infocom alumni, even playtesters and “just folks” who happened to be around when the teletypes spit out these fantastic worlds. There’s a lot in there – easily a few weeks’ viewing.

These interviews are “cooked”. This means that they’re the answers people gave during the interviews, not recordings of my questions or my stories I told them to get them into the mood. This is because, straight up, I got buckets of crap from complainers who didn’t like listening to my questions, criticized my voice, dissed my approach, and generally sat in the middle of the theater with cheetos screaming “DOWN IN FRONT” because they don’t know how you get a good interview out of someone for the purposes of a documentary (as opposed to, say, a talk show or a newspaper). I realized I was slowing up getting new interviews out because of the abuse, so this was the compromise. It means people just make a lot of statements with cold cuts between them, but trust me, you’re getting a fillet, not a jumble. A few people have gone “you should present these better”, to which I go “yeah, I call it GET LAMP”. It’s the classic balance – short and coherent or long and a little off-topic and jarring. Now you can choose both.

There are a handful of interviews related to Choose Your Own Adventure/Gamebooks that are not up. This is because they’re being given to a different documentary crew who are going to do a specific gamebooks/CYOA documentary project. I’ll let them have their fun before I put the full copies anywhere else. They’re safe, trust me. And I’ve met the crew in person – great people.

So, please, enjoy this massive collection and, under no circumstances, read anything below this paragraph. Thank you.

Generally, I inspire confidence in people regarding the documentary and written work I do. I’d like to think it was earned, slowly, in a process of working with people not used to attention or investigation, and giving them the freedom and respect that any reasonable person should expect. On the whole, my general audience might feel the same way – that what comes from me is going to be honest and respectful, and what stays and goes is based on rational thinking and not, say, some subterfuge or fear about “the truth” or what have you. As I’ve been in the public eye in my current historian role for well over a decade and in the documentarian role for half of that, I’ve had some very kind gestures and very heartfelt actions of trust come my way. I honor and acknowledge every one.

Sadly, GET LAMP will always have a few cracks of regret in the sides of the marble Façade. I intend to repair a couple next year, but some things will never be repaired.

The easy to repair situation is that there were several people who refused to be interviewed, and yet anyone who knows anything about the subject knows those people were (and are) critical players. These include Will Crowther, Emily Short, and Graham Nelson. I reached out to all of them about being interviewed. Only Graham was a complete dick about it and wouldn’t even deign to respond – everyone else either explicitly declined to me or declined to my intermediary. I then went in the opposite direction, and pulled these folks completely out of the narrative, in some wrong-headed view of “respect”. This was because I conflated “not willing to be interviewed” with “would not like to have their name associated with the subject or your documentary in any way whatsoever”, which was completely off the mark. I will repair this when the downloadable version of GET LAMP makes an appearance next year and I do some minor nicks and tucks with the editing. So that one’s not that big a deal.

The other one is a big deal.

If you currently browse the GET LAMP interviews as of this writing, you will see very few people related to Infocom. You won’t see, in other words, the “big names” and their full raw interviews from my collection. You’ll see a few people semi-related, and a couple people who have given me the go-ahead, but the situation is that I have handed off the raw interviews to those Infocom alumni for explicit sign-off, where they will have the opportunity to review their footage and decide whether or not the raw interviews are released to the public.

They have this sign-off because all the Infocom alumni had final cut approval on GET LAMP, and I feel it would be really sleazy to have given final cut approval and then turn around and release all their interviews without approval, even a few years down the line.

And now you might ask yourself why every Infocom alumni had final cut approval of GET LAMP, something the other 60 interviewees didn’t have. Ah, yes.

In the course of GET LAMP’s production, a lot of people came forward with information. Hundreds of people did, with thousands of letters in my archives to prove it. They gave me warnings of subjects to dig deeper on, contact information for people worth connecting, and even some very amusing pitches about why they should be in the film. (Some of those pitches worked, by the way, because they should have been in the film!) I had people send me photos, software, drawings, maps, and audio that sometimes found itself in the final work. I am indebted to these people.

And at one point, someone asked me if I wanted “The Infocom Drive”.

A road-tested documentary guy at this point, and an investigatory type besides, I said “Of course I do. And what is it, anyway?”

What it was was a roughly 200 megabyte drive image, a zip file, containing all the original Infocom source code from its Cambridge days, as well as memos, code-sketches, e-mails, ad copy, and documentation. It was as if the sky opened up and this item fell into my hands. Take a moment to imagine yourself in this position, getting this file, going through it, realizing this is what it was.

At the time, I was terrified I now had something so rare and so critical, that it should be protected and backed up at all costs. To this end, I turned around and put a copy of this drive image with three people in three continents. The idea was they would have a copy if something happened to me or if other issues came forward and my machines were lost or stolen or anything else. It just seemed that important, that once-in-a-lifetime. I also returned source code from these games back to their original writers – I felt that was right, that they should have their own work back. I got some very heartfelt thank yous for this. Private thank yous, of course, but that’s all that was needed.

I thought I’d trusted the three copies to my closest friends. I was wrong.

One of them decided they didn’t have an entrusted legacy. They decided they had a “scoop”. They decided the best thing to do would be to both announce they had a copy of this drive (and therefore that such a thing existed), and then write a long article in which they explicitly quoted private e-mails, and let decades-old trashing of a person stand. And counter to claims of being a “journalist”, none of the primary figures were contacted before this article went up, even though I had their direct contact information.

Please do not be fooled by the self-serving “update”, written a year and a half after the article was posted and deleting the private e-mails. It’s self-serving bullshit meant to give the appearance of repentance and moral growth. The article was written to gain attention, to garner hits, to parade private lives for the looky-loo public with no regard to the effect it would have.

There is a moment, sometimes lasting a long time indeed, in which a betrayal is so deep and so distinct you have a vacuum of feeling, a deep-space numbness at what has been done. I got to experience that full-hand – what I saw in this betrayal was a direct torpedoing of GET LAMP.

I did not enjoy the next few months very much. I did not enjoy the e-mails from people pointing the article to me and suggesting that I work hard to get a copy of the Infocom Drive. I did not enjoy the debates from people who did not know such a thing existed ten minutes before about how it was for “the good” of this-or-that that these private e-mails be splattered everywhere. And I most certainly didn’t like the thought of what this meant to the Infocom alumni themselves.

Perhaps you can imagine, if you take a moment, what the Infocom alumni thought of my project, my unfinished film, if this was the action I had taken (even indirectly) with their private correspondence. What sort of movie or dramatic made-up dogshit Discovery Channel-level sleaze-collage this documentary was going to be, if this was acceptable. I was in danger of not only losing a project I’d spent years of my life on at that point, but losing all these new friends and collaborators, and most importantly, being a party to hurting them and making their lives worse off, which this article had most absolutely done.

Besides a very honest apology to all of them in e-mail and on phone calls, I also immediately offered them final cut approval of GET LAMP. They would get to see anything with them in it (which were most of the films and bonus features on the DVD) and let them decide if they were comfortable being a part of it. If they were not, they’d be gone, removed from the film.

As I am a person who respects his subjects and who tries to remember I am chronicling lives and not just Google-honey, the final work was approved by all. The small delay in waiting for sign-offs was negligible for the sense of relief that the film would not be regretted.

Every once in a while, someone mentions the article’s author in my presence, assuming that we are friends and we collaborate and work together. They assume wrong, and are often shocked to find it is not the case. Now they perhaps more clearly know why.

It was a very hard mistake I made. It was a terrible lesson to learn, and I learned it.

When I watch GET LAMP or think about the project, it is a sad off-tune note in the orchestra that I hear in my heart and my ears, souring things ever so slightly. Not enough to regret having done the project, but to wish to get onto the next projects and never expose my subjects to such a humiliating parade again.

And maybe now you hear it too.

Enjoy the footage.

 

5 Comments

Why You Should Follow the Digital Antiquarian —

A weblog post that does little else but tell you to follow another weblog? Well, yeah, deal with it. This is a very special weblog I’m talking about.

Here’s Jimmy Maher. I’ve never met this guy, but I love him. For the past year and a half or so (since March of 2011) Jimmy has been ripping shit up. He has taken home computer history, especially from the software side, and he has grabbed that sucker with gusto. In his description of his site, The Digital Antiquarian, he mentions that he’s currently a househusband from Dallas Texas now happily living in Norway. He’s not specifically up to much, apparently, although he has some ideas to go for a PhD or equivalently intellectual enterprise. Until he does, though, his Digital Antiquarian site is an absolute must read.

What we’re getting, right now, are free chapters of a book about the home computer software industry, US and UK, with trackdowns of facts, backfilling of anecdotes, and brilliant insights into all sorts of ranges of history that I couldn’t hope to find the time to begin work on. While I’m over here getting lots of data into the Internet Archive and assembling my various film and scanning projects, Jimmy is blowing out, with incredible regularity and consistent quality, entries on all manner of subjects very close and very dear to my heart and therefore, I hope, yours.

The story of Broderbund. An overview of Dog Star Adventure followed by an interview with the writer, Lance Micklus. A critical regard of the oft-cited sales numbers for Akalabeth.  A full narrated play-through of Ultima II. Everything, and I do mean everything, about Penguin Software.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Each entry is a home run, and there are now dozens of entries on this site. If it was a book, I’d have bought it. If was a magazine, I’d have devoured it. If it was a lecture series, it’d be cued up on my iPad, ready to play and listen to while resting and looking out a window, or while driving. It’s perfect.

There are people who I wish I could be, if had the time and the no-other-commitments thing going. Jimmy’s one of those guys. It’s surreal to watch someone cold-drop dozens (it’s possibly approaching the hundreds) of pages about stuff I honestly care about, and where I learn 5 new things every new post.

Have I made myself clear?

Get yourself reading The Digital Antiquarian immediately. No excuses. It’s one of the single most important home computer history weblogs, no, books, out there.

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Just Solving the Problem: A Review —

So, in the summer I suggested the idea of a “Just Solve the Problem” month, the idea of putting together a way for people to assemble and attack an extant, “unsolvable” problem and improve the state of the universe before it burns out. I suggested November, which is a nice, generally dull month. And I suggested the “File Format Problem”, which I had opined was just the sort of “unsolvable, unless endless energy was applied to it” problem that is out there.

It’s now December 1st. We did Just Solve the Problem Month. How did it go?

The short answer is it went very well. Dozens of people contributed, and we built a wiki that references thousands of file formats, and has entries on many hundreds. All of the contributed writing is CC0/Public domain, and Archive Team will be going through the Wiki shortly and deep-downloading all the referenced websites from the Wiki, to ensure these found materials are not lost going forward.

The Just Solve the Problem Wiki is changing URLs, too. The new URL is:

fileformats.archiveteam.org.

The Justsolve.archiveteam.org site will soon become a general one for “Just Solve the Problem”, and will have links over to the fileformats wiki that this first project generated. The fileformats wiki will continue to live on and be added to – the advantage of the project is that the 30 days can be considered the “beta” or “startup” phase and additional changes can be done to the now-living permanent URL and site and continue to grow.

So let’s discuss the positive aspects.

First, we now have the foundation of a file formats reference list that extends out in many aggressive directions, covering a wide spectrum of encapsulated standards for reading information. While of course we’re nowhere near “complete”, this site stands as a non-affiliated, non-censored/constricted collection of information to be used to bring a whole family of older or obscure files into the modern era. It’s a good place to be.

Next, the wiki format means it’ll be possible for people so inclined to continue to contribute to the project – we didn’t just put out some bindered report and call it a day. It’s a living site, just one that is going to have its own impetus for sticking around and not because it’s part of some “event”. I’ll be contributing to it for sure, and I hope others continue to as well.

Just as a general directory, the File Formats wiki has a lot of usefulness. Check out this entry on ATASCII, which is the Atari-specific character set used by Atari Computers for a number of years. Character set images, utilities, videos, and PDFs provide the documentation for someone encountering ATASCII (or beginning to understand what they have in their collection) and will provide all sorts of help for those folks for a long time to come. As we buffer away the linked-to resources and store them, the critical information referenced will have permanence as well. It works out very nicely.

Expanding it out past just some basic file formats was also enjoyable, as people added information about punch cards, photographic film, and Interactive Fiction. Good links going to a lot of places, and it was fun to see what churned out of the effort as time went on.

So yeah, wild success on a number of fronts. The project was announced, the project happened, people contibuted to the project, and a Thing has come of it, a Thing that has a future to be added to and improved over time. That puts it past a lot of “hack event” projects and way past a lot of open source endeavors. A rousing success.

The rest of this entry is me punching people.

Before I punch anybody, though, allow me to punch myself.

The project had a lot more intra-party stress than I had expected, and a lot of weird moments and dark times. I’m going to take some credit for that. I’m a Doer. I make things Go. I am action oriented, and believe that effort expended beats effort discussed. I’m not against planning and preparation – far from it. But even the planning and preparation I do tends to be oriented towards the goal, and not necessarily talking about all the ways that the effort is not worth it or why some aspect of it is less than kosher. This means by some standards, I run roughshod over the feelings of others to get things rolling. This method works very well in Archive Team’s main contexts. It does not necessarily work in all contexts.

It especially didn’t work with a project consisting of the type of flutterbys who would be most deeply attracted to a file format enumeration exercise.

I got a lot of “whys”. Why are we here? Why are we doing this? Why include languages in a file format collection? Why are we doing the hierarchy this way, or that way? Why are we using breadcrumbs versus infoboxes? Why are we locking ourselves down in these terms when we have these other terms? Why? Why? Why?

I should have realized that the people whose daily lives are invaded and owned by rigid structure, would, devoid of that structure, start to implement even more rigid structure themselves. And they would resent being told it was something going on later. I thought the constriction of the types of institutions people work in related to digital preservation was a necessary evil, to be resented and left out until the last minute – for some people, it was a prerequisite for a sane, safe process. So that was a surprise.

Instead of calling this a one-time event, I got ahead of myself and called it a potential first round of a perpetual event. This completely confused some people, possibly terminally. They wondered why I’d chosen THIS problem, when X and Y sort-of-solutions existed for it. And they assumed (in some cases), that file format enumeration would be the annual event, not a one-time event that would be followed by other one-time events.

I say this, and yet some people shone through. If you take the time to browse through the edit history, you start seeing names of people like Dan Tobias and Halftheisland and others – people who contributed hundreds of edits, the tough boring ones that can mean completeness instead of dilettante smatterings of entries. They worked hard on this thing. Bravo, you folks.

Of the 109 people who registered accounts, and remember, you had to mail us and request an account, 50 never did a single edit after getting their account. Boo.

What’s next? I seriously don’t know. I’m going to cool down for a month or two, clean up things on the Wiki with the help of others, and reformat the justsolve page to be general. Right now, my urge to do another one of these is the same to shoot myself in the crotch with a nailgun while standing in a tub of saltwater, but I have worked in a number of things (films, plays, loading firewood) where talking right after things are done sounds like the fall of heaven, but hope and energy reblooms and the return to positive hopes springs eternal. So I’ll get back to you on that.

All in all, an amazing experiment. I learned a lot. The world is a better place. The Problem is a lot more solved than it was 30 days ago. Thanks for participating, everyone.

 

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