ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Javascript Hero: Success / Your Big Moment —

The Javascript MESS project, where we’re porting MESS to Javascript, is now chugging along very nicely. The time for action is now. I’m very excited! This is where you get to pitch in, in a variety of ways.

Let me state the goal again: take the MESS project, which is a massive open-sourced effort to emulate every possible computer system and console that exists, and make it run in a window in a browser. In doing so, allow anyone with a web browser of reasonable power the ability to experience, in great convenience, many of the aspects of any previously made software in human history. This is a very lofty goal.

Some of this has been discussed before, but if this is the first time you’re hearing of it, let me quickly go over it.

  • After deciding to go with a Javascript port of MESS, I needed coders comfortable with the idea. I did not need people telling me it was impossible or not to do it. Luckily I got a few key examples of the first group and could ignore the second.
  • The plan, hatched with a couple of people, was to use Emscripten to convert MESS source code to something running in Javascript. This would require people competent in Emscripten, Emscripten source code, MESS source code, and Javascript. More pushback, more nay-sayers. But we found them.
  • A month or two ago, we got a public-domain colecovision cart to render using this setup. But no keypresses. Now we have keypresses.

The running joke for me was “WHERE ARE MY SMURFS”. The acid test for me, the proof this was possible, was a window running a playable copy of Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle, which was truly a terrible game but one I played over at my friend Paul’s house in 1982. As the team tirelessly ran through the dozens and dozens of tweaks, on the addition of features to Emscripten and the makefile mods to MESS, “WHERE ARE MY SMURFS”.

And now the smurfs have come:

Oh, make no mistake: It’s slow as molasses. (Running at 12% speed on my browser on a pretty high-powered machine) It has no sound (we’re working on it). And the keys can sometimes be grabbed away by other processes and materials. (Key bindings are a bitch, and still being hacked away at.) But it works. Multiple people took me aside to “help” me by explaining how it was entirely impossible this could ever happen. But it happened. It works.

It even lets you use the internal menu of the MESS program: here it is letting you know about the CPU and the video output:

We did some tests with multiple Colecovision cartridges – it plays most. (Not all, of course, depending on how well MESS emulates anything and a bunch of other factors.) So right now it can do about 100 cartridges. It’s proof of concept.

But now we’re expanding out.

Next we’re going after the Magnavox Odyssey², specifically to be able to run K.C. Munchkin, a historically important console game pulled in the early salvos of the “look and feel” wars started by Atari. We’re also trying for the Apple II.

This is where the payoff comes, you see – the MESS emulator can emulate 632 unique systems with 1,668 total system variations. 632! As we build frameworks for compilation, we’ll have javascript emulators for all of these, all able to follow the MESS development cycle, which is enormously aggressive.

So how can you help?

  • We need testers. I didn’t want to drag people in until we started having something for them to see – and now we do. We need people to run through items as we add them, to find weirdness and missing items and the rest.
  • We need Javascript coders. Emscripten produces, not surprisingly, some pretty tangled code in compilation. Someone might find ways to make individual compilations faster, speeding up these items that much more. Maybe we’re missing some settings that will make the output work better on more platforms.
  • We need you to improve MESS. My dream is that this project will ensure, once and for all, that any work you throw into the MESS emulator will have instant, worldwide effect, as improvements on emulation will show up in browser windows everywhere. It’s not some obscure thing – I want these to end up being general purpose computer utilities that people use to portray older computers in windows, and your work will be very prominent. Read up on them and join them.

Please come to #jsmess on EFnet or e-mail me. Get involved. If you were on the wall wondering if the thing could ever even work, it does. It works. Now help us make it work well.

 

5 Comments

Haircut and a Holocaust —

This post is kind of a bummer, although it does have a somewhat happy ending.

I don’t discuss my own family history before my being born all that often – mostly out of privacy, partially out of not having been there, and maybe a dash of “too busy on other subjects”, but I wanted to mention how I changed my mind on something, and maybe others will change their mind too.

I had kind of a thing going, an intention to not really set foot in Germany. It’s actually hard to avoid an entire country, especially once you start travelling nearby, and while I did end up taking a train through Germany, and at one point I had to transfer planes at an airport in Germany as well, I was kind of avoiding the place.

You see, World War II wasn’t all that great to some lines of my family. We lost enough family members through direct, specific murder that in a few cases we don’t even know what their names were. At this point, pretty much all relatives same-generation connected to them are gone, so I’ll mention it, but let’s just set that down here. Really bad situation. entire branches of family hauled off and killed. Sorry, can’t sugar-coat that.

So somewhere along that line, I had come up with some rough decision that that was it for my visiting Germany, Germany had killed quite enough of the family, thanks, and I wasn’t going to go there. Obviously I ended up taking a train through the country on the way to another one and the I transferred a plane at one point. But somehow, going directly there seemed wrong, somehow.

Here it is, 2012, and I accepted an invitation to come speak about Geocities in Germany later this year. Let me mention why.

On my way down to MAGfest in Maryland to do some documentary screening and filming, I found myself at 9am looking for something to eat. So I pulled off Interstate 95, in Aberdeen, Maryland, and looked for a breakfast. As I was driving down this exit road, I spied a barbershop. Well, heck, I could use a haircut, I thought – I was definitely looking scruffy and a small trim would go well with my outfit and efforts to film people at MAGfest.

So that was how I found myself at the All-American Barber Shop. It was a tiny affair, set into a strip mall as it was, and was itself a little run-down, but I’ve had plenty of haircuts, and you can’t judge what you’re going to get just because the old guy with the scissors has a few scant tools at his disposal, versus some chrome-and-rainbows megacut place in the middle of a city. So I caught them as they were opening, and I got to be haircut #1.

It was the barber and his, well, I assume buddy – he might have been another haircut guy who was off-duty or just a bullshittin’ friend who showed up for the opening shift when nobody, at 9am on a thursday, is thinking “man, I could use a haircut toot sweet before heading in late to work”. I can’t tell you much about them except they were full-gray old, and the barber, my barber, was in a suit and the other person was in a tracksuit.

So, the hair’s getting cut and these two guys are chatting, and of course they’re going all over the map based on what the news on the radio is blasting. Some discussion of war hit the radio, and they were talking about this or that, and they mentioned the relatively low casualties of the recent wars. Being a historian, I casually referenced the Battle of Verdun, which, look it up, is pretty astounding – hundreds of thousands of deaths over a small territory in the course of ten months. Oh, you know me – always throwing in where I shouldn’t.

So then, with my hair getting cut in my little plastic sheet that I’m wearing, I hear the tracksuited man reference how there were lots of terrible deaths, except of course that whole “millions of jews in world war II thing”.

Uh oh, I thought, did he just…

So for the next 10 minutes or so, I get to hear these two guys discussing how overblown that killed-jews number is, how most of them just left, that it wasn’t that many people anyway. They went on for quite a while, touching on a pretty wide range of related topics, referencing learned items from some “pamphlets” one of them had – “they tell you stuff you would not believe!” stuck out as a phrase in there. Yes, I am sure I would not believe most of what you apparently read in your literature.

So, I have this very old pair of scissors. I mean, really old. Somewhat rusty, although sharp enough that it has function. They come from my great-uncle Sam, who, I can assure you, had a number tattooed on his arm, who had watched his infant son killed in front of him, who had nearly all his immediate family forcibly hauled off and never seen again, and who, after being processed inside an actual, real concentration camp, scaled the fence and refugee’d himself into the US. I promise you, this really happened. And when he got here, the job he ended up having for many, many years, until he died like someone should die if there’s justice, of a heart attack while shoveling the snow out of his suburban driveway, was that of a barber.

So I keep those scissors, you see, because they went through a lot and yet they still work, and I like to keep him fresh in my mind.

So these two gentlemen, happily denying that anything like that happened, who were tossing off “facts” and “figures” like it was all some sort of distant hoax put on as a prank by some 1940s yids, well, they helped me realize something.

My family wasn’t murdered by Germans. They were murdered by a mindset.

A mindset that really doesn’t know a border, one that doesn’t really tolerate getting out of line, and which, once you dehumanize or destroy something a ways away, be it miles or thousands of miles away, can infest and infect for decades, reducing something very real into the realm of chuckling derision by two idiots in a crappy barber shop called the “All American Barber”.

So I’m going to Germany. I’ll be speaking about Geocities.

You can’t bring scissors on a plane. That’s the only reason I won’t be bringing them.

17 Comments

Taking the Sears Time Machine for a Test Drive —

I tried one of those experiments, where a lot of people know something might work, but nobody wants to put down the bucks to see if it will. So I decided to go for it.

Sears, that venerable chain of mail catalogs-turned-stores-turned-K-Mart-Meal, has a Parts Direct website where, in theory, you can buy anything they ever sold. Naturally, some parts become discontinued, as old parts often do. You wouldn’t be surprised to hear a warehouse dumped old items, especially old technology/computer parts, long ago. What you would be surprised about is if they still offered replacement parts for computers that have not been for sale for 25 years.

Enter the Atari 400.

Man, I get so happy looking at this thing, because it brings me way the hell back to when it first came out – I was about 11 when I would see it at the mall, and that price tag, about $500, seemed almost attainable, almost within reach. (It wasn’t; I was dirt poor at the time.) Ironically, that keyboard, that flat touch-panel keyboard, made it irresistible to me, even though older-me knows, looking at it, what an utter pain in the ass it would be to use it for any amount of time. The colors were so rich, the font so distinct, I just fell in love with it.

(As it turns out, I ended up getting the Atari 800, a more expensive model in the same family that had all the things that the 400 lacked, and I was a much happier person, if a few years past the drooling child who wanted that computer so badly.)

Here’s what the Sears catalog page for the Atari 400 looked like:

I am much older since then – in fact, it’s been 30 years since my endless staring at the Atari 400 at Service Merchandise. So imagine my surprise when I found out that the parts for Atari 400s were still available at the Sears Parts website. Along with, I might add, diagrams to help you understand the parts:

Remember, there’s a big market for used computer parts. Big, big, big. Vintage computer groups get together and trade items. People trade software, t-shirts, stickers, hardware, you name it. The better in shape, the more valuable. In nearly every trade of older hardware, be it computers or car parts or scientific equipment or tools, there’s the concept of NEW OLD STOCK, which is where something was made, at the factory, sealed up, and then never touched again. You pull it out of the bag (assuming the cultural aspects of your group allow it), and it is new, like you just stepped back in time. It is the year it came out, and you’ve stopped down to get your new toy. It’s right here. That experience can almost be priceless, although be rest assured that there is almost always an actual price. A high one, in fact.

But on this page, for a moment, it appeared that you could, against all odds and reason, order Atari 400 replacement parts as if they’d never gone out of style, never dropped out in favor of the later models and the march of progress. A lot of people might say “well, it would never actually happen” and not waste the time to go through the pain of ordering,  putting money on the line, and then waiting however long to see if New Old Stock Atari parts arrived in the mail like it was no big thing.

I am not a lot of people.

I ordered 46-33811-3 (SPEAKER ASSE), 46-353101-3 (PCB MOTHER), 46-691496-3 (TV SW BOX), and 46-353099-3 (PCB RAM BD). If you’re looking at the diagram above, that’s numbers 5 and 9 and two other parts not shown. I chose the ones that were hardest to replace with newer versions; power supplies, for example, could be reborn a thousand new ways (and have been). One exception: The TV SW BOX, i.e. RF Modulator, which could easily be replaced but was $12, so I could see how well the system worked, assuming they had actually gone through the trouble of finding a new RF modulator replacement.

Let’s not waste your time with suspense. The experiment’s result is Sears Doesn’t Have Shit.

On one hand, hooray, that’s $250 I get back. On the other hand, it means an end to my dream of having a box arrive on my front porch, with a Sears mark, and opening it to find a perfect Atari 400 part packaged like “Pac-Man Fever” is blasting on the radio behind me and I have not yet kissed anyone.

So, a small tangent to this.

Sears in the 1970s was at the end of when department stores, in general, actually gave a damn about their products, about the customers, and about doing things right. There were problems, to be sure, but some things were very, very sacred. And with a history spanning either 80 or 100 years depending on how you looked at it, Sears, Roebuck and Co. treated the maintenance of the products they sold as inherently sacred. To that extent, in the 1970s, Atari had to provide Sears with ways to repair, maintain, and inspect the Atari 400. This resulted in a repairman’s manual for same. (Thanks to Charliecron for this image);

Can you imagine many contemporary companies having this situation for, say, a hard drive or a flat-screen TV? A custom, in-house manual for their repair department to be able to take the item in and fix it back into working order? Those times are, on the whole, pretty much gone.

And they have to be – margins are smaller than ever, integration is still vertical but not in the name of making things better, and who cares, we’re going to throw all this crap out in 2 years when we add a whooziz to it.

In 2004, Sears was bought out by K-Mart, itself a venerable company but one much less aimed towards the kind of item maintenance and appliance/electronics focus Sears had from its tool catalog days. And I don’t really need to talk about how chain stores’ fortunes have risen and fallen dramatically over the past few decades, other to say that a lot of things were flung away through the fortunes raised and lost.

Apparently some of those things were Atari parts.

CONCLUSION: PARTS UNAVAILABLE – STICK WITH E-BAY.

8 Comments

On the On the Media —

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield. Once we put photos in a scrapbook. Today we put them on Flickr. Once we chronicled our days in a diary. Now we update our Facebook page. Once we kept Super 8 movies of our kids. These days we post videos on YouTube. Once upon a time, we also put things on GeoCities and Friendster and Google Video. But now – they’re long gone.

Well, Jason Scott operates on the premise that every repository of user-generated content online will one day die but that the content we put there is worth saving. He leads an ad hoc group of archivists called the Archive Team, who swoop in to salvage material when a site is closing. Still, he wishes the users would render his service obsolete. And so, he urges everyone who begins to post to prepare for the end.

JASON SCOTT:  Anytime you want to join up with anything, any kind of service that lets you do things for free, the first question is, where is your export function, where can I grab a copy from your site of the material? If they say, we’re working on it, then they’re lying to you. It should be as easy for them to do that as anything else. So if they do have an export function, use it. People put their lives online and then one day wake up and realize it’s not there anymore. They are keeping their memories on spinning magnetic pieces of metal.

BOB GARFIELD:  That somebody else owns.

JASON SCOTT:  Yes.

BOB GARFIELD:  Set the scene for me. You get the notice of some service that is on its way out, what do you do?

JASON SCOTT:  It’s helpful to understand that there’s a whole bunch of services out there, where you might have millions of accounts – things like GeoCities, Friendster, you know, even places like Foursquare and Flickr, where people have been encouraged to, for free, upload things they made or are doing, and then at some point someone moves a check mark from column A to column B, and they decide, eh, after this next financial quarter I think we’ll be taking this down. And the amount of time they give you is – basically random.

I’ve seen everything from six months to 48 hours. And all these people who may not have even thought about this site for – years suddenly are having it taken away. They might not be alive, they may not know how to get to their old account. They may not be checking that email.

And so, what we did was come up with this idea of the Archive Team, a collection of archivists, developers, and we would do our best to take one snapshot of the place, put it into an archive and give people the option of getting some of their data back.

BOB GARFIELD:  Give me some example. What sites have you rushed in to salvage what is stored there?

JASON SCOTT:  There were a couple of sites that did podcasts – Podango, MyPodcast. And what would happen is, is they would literally give you four or five days to get off – thousands of shows, thousands of episodes. So we go in and we’ve pulled down hundreds and hundreds of shows and thousands of episodes.

Poetry.com, that was a company where people were basically making their poems available, and it had about 14 million written poems. And the company basically announced, we’re shutting down, we’re going to give you about a month, hope you enjoyed your time [LAUGHS] with your poetry. So we went in and we started downloading it, and what we discovered, to our great surprise, was they started blocking us from downloading the poetry.

BOB GARFIELD:  What was the relationship between you and the authors at the time? Did they express frustration that they couldn’t get at their stuff?

JASON SCOTT:  One of the things that always breaks our heart is that one of these companies will announce they’re shutting down, and they’ll put it into a blog post – “Goodbye, it’s been great,” and then all the comments will be, “Please help me, how do I save this? I can’t find my husband’s password, he died two years ago.” You know, we get compared to firemen. You’d go in and you try to grab what you can.

So we grabbed the most popular poems, based on their viewer counts, and then we tried to sequentially go through and get as many poems as we could.

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, there’s a little vigilantism you’re describing here. Tell me about the legality?

JASON SCOTT:  Oh man, you know, the thing is we all know that this country is a little psychotic about copyright, right? I mean, just a little bit. We’re not selling what we’re putting here. We’re not putting ads on it and putting it back up again. We’re definitely not giving it to other businesses and selling it to them, you know?

Some of these things have no commercial value whatsoever, some of them might have commercial value, but the fact is, is that we are literally being that guy that hopefully in 20 years, 50 years someone goes, “Oh, thank goodness they were here at that point.”

Sites that block us are extremely rare because we find these companies have actually given up not just watching them but even caring about them.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, much of what anyone posts is trivial, and if it gets lost, who cares. Is most of what you bring back just kind of, I don’t know, junk?

JASON SCOTT:  You know, the example that I give is a Civil War letter to a wife from her husband who was on the front lines. It might be the most trivial thing just saying, hope the cows are okay, hope you’re fine, but there’s so much other information coded in there.

There could be a water mark showing that a company that said it never worked for that side did, in fact, sell paper to that side. It could be a certain kind of ink. It could be that that one front guy became a general, and this is one of the few cases of him signing his own name.

I know it’s a stretch but there are people right now taking some of the things we download and doing cultural analysis: “This is what happens when life went online, this is what happened when people reached a larger audience than their genetic line had ever reached. What did they do, given that power?”

And so, even though we might objectively say this is trivial, I wouldn’t want these read out to me one by one forever, everything historical that we see is because a whole line of people said, “Let’s now throw out that box, let’s not delete that tape, let’s not get rid of those pictures.” And I don’t want to be the guy who decided, okay, this is good, this is bad and then a hundred years later be hated.

BOB GARFIELD:  Jason, thank you very much.

JASON SCOTT:  Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:  Jason Scott leads the Archive Team.

♦

So, we can leave the interview at that, but I won’t. If you want to read on, that’s your choice.

As a semi-professional attention getter, I end up being interviewed a lot, especially when some hot new thing is attached to me. In the current realm, that hot new thing is Archive Team. It’s got what the hungry news producer wants: a humanity-endearing goal (preserve), a bad guy (everyone who is deleting user data for money reasons), and a guy who’s up for being really loud and really intense (me). There’s a lot more to Archive Team than just me, of course, but as it is I am sucked into studios for discussing this whole mess quite frequently.

I was interviewed by the BBC for a show called “Click!“, the results of which are available, to some extent, at this link. To do this, the BBC rented space near where I was in San Francisco that week – they actually used a studio called KQED. Here’s some shots from that:

In this particular case, the engineer was a little off the ball, dragging on with the previous setup so that the rented time that the BBC had was cut by a half-hour. We got on track pretty quickly, and my two hosts were very talented at bringing the whole thing a sort of growly-sexy “now, we’re all having a bit of a fun, but what of the deeper meaning” vibe that I only really see in English programs. I was coy about the names of companies Archive Team was targeting that week, mostly because I didn’t want it to filter into boardrooms and cause a panic mode, but the BBC guys sussed out which companies I was talking about anyway, so kudos for doing a little legwork. As you can see from the photos, you sit at a desk and have a huge microphone, as well as seats for other guests and speakers with everyone looking at you. KQED is a hell of a nice studio, and it was a pleasure to be in there.

Perhaps it’s a little jarring that you don’t see your hosts, and will never see them, but the people involved tend to be professionals and end up making it like the greatest-sounding phone call of your life. It’s a fun gig and I will happily continue to do them.

So contact came in from a producer of the NPR show “On the Media” to discuss Archive Team, and it’s obvious they wanted it because of a relatively recent magazine writeup, as well as wanting it right away. After some back and forth discussion, I ended up on the phone with the producer for a “pre-interview”, which a person used to podcasts might not have experienced – basically, the producer conducts almost an entire actual interview to determine whether or not you’re retarded. If you’re not retarded, you get to go on to an actual interview with the host, at some point down the line. Most shows can’t afford to rent a studio, much less throw a human being at you to spend an hour interviewing, but when they do this, it generally means you’re dealing with a top tier organization.

As I said before, I get pulled into Archive Team representation a lot right now, but for the past half-dozen years or so, I’ve actually been on a secondary mission/goal – to spread and share as much of my life outlook and learned lessons to as many people who are prepared to receive it. To that end, I’ve tried to share with other like-minded compatriots whatever it is possible to share, so that my ideas and the things I care about outlive and outreach me. It’s a nice goal.

And that’s why I was in a studio in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest Festival, to speak about Archive Team with the NPR “On the Media” show. And why I brought along Astrid, one of the Archive Team members who happened to also be at South by Southwest. Here’s what the studio we were at for it looked like:

I was trying to show Astrid how the pros work, so she could learn how to react quickly to whiplash questions and clarification requests from one of the bigger names. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

After the 20 minute delay getting started while we cooled our heels (and by the way, the engineer for our session, David Alvarez in the window there, was pro beyond pro and a pleasure to work with), we were finally connected with my interviewer.

I should have sussed out what the next 35 minutes were going to be like when the VERY FIRST part of the conversation went this way:

JASON: Hi, how are you doing?

BOB: (Pause) I’ll be a lot better later.

What followed was a stumbling, barely coherent host jumping all over the place, and peppering questions of all variant quality, interspersed with commands to his engineer/producer, the kinds of things you generally want to say POST interview. Not here.

I think the best moment, however, and one which thankfully didn’t make it to the final cut, was when we were discussing Archive Team’s proactive methods, Bob told the story of OJ being arrested for threatening someone at gunpoint over his own property and going to jail for years, and asked how we’re different. Nice one.

Anyway, I was mostly sad after all this because I could see how disappointed Astrid was. I’m not saying they made Astrid cry, but what a better use of our time if we’d been in the place of greatness. We were not.

Is the final work a nice one? Yes, someone in the On the Media organization edited the hell out of that thing. Does that mean I should shut up and take it? Nah. I’m telling you how it went down in the event that someone else gets Bob on the wrong side of the bed one morning and thinks it was them or their fault. It wasn’t.

If I have to give one piece of advice I’ve learned over the years of dealing with news media of all stripe, it’s that you get all kinds. The ones who respect you and make the audience informed about your subject while adding their own insight – those jewels should be given your respect and time. (Kim Zetter, call me, we’ll do lunch.) But if you find yourself on the ass end of a paddling for nothing other than a lazy or distracted or resentful scribe, hang up or resolve never to deal with them again, if you don’t realize it until it’s too late. Trust me, there’ll be others.

Hey, I warned you about reading further!

6 Comments

…and here we are. —

It took a lot to get me to move the ASCII weblog. A ton, a mass. You have to be a certain high quality of assmunch to get me to throw half a day into the fire and slowly, painfully move 9 years of website, of individual, unique quirks and odd choices, buried under the sands of time and forgotten lore. You have to be that awful that I find the need to get away, as fast as I can, and then subject myself to untold additional hours fixing up the resulting mess.

Dreamhost is all that.

I don’t have any desire to go into the full details, other than to say I watched my dreamhost accounts get compromised, I watched test directories I set far apart into new users get compromised, and as my site would regularly get taken over for google-bot-oriented spam, I could then see the pain, the misery, the sadness of trying to figure out what I needed to do. Counter this with the fact that when the chips were down on several occasions, Dreamhost kicked me so hard into the curb my forehead still says “protect our rivers” backwards, and it just came down to “oh, I really gotta get out of here”.

Finally, while I was getting some very nice and kind attention from Jeff Atwood on his Codinghorror website, the machine this was hosted on went down, and then it came back a day later, and the load has been 112 or greater on that thing since then. I don’t care about the excuses; the site flat out stopped functioning. It was dead.

Well, they did it – I’m gone. I still have stuff over there, but the march has begun. If I have anything in my defense, it’s that when I started with this 9 years ago, things weren’t so bad. But like all shared hosting, the bloom comes off the rose and the next time you look up, your head is being slammed against the footboard and there’s nothing but slack-jawed dimwithood when you try and make things better.

I’m now hosting with TQhosting, who have been hosting the main textfiles.com site for years now, to perfection. Sorry it took me so long, folks.

Let’s get back to writing, shall we?

6 Comments

Listen! (A Lost Project) —

A while back, I was asked to take some of my recordings of telephone conference lines and arrange them into some sort of recording or demonstrative collage. The idea was that it would be a cornerstone of a presentation and appearance at an event. Over time, I decided the event was not something I wanted to be part of, but in the meantime, I’d created a collage of telephone conference recordings, as a prototype. As I figure I spent some time on it, and some folks enjoy my editing, I thought I’d drop it here.

It’s about 20 minutes, uses a bunch of CC-SA music, and combines probably 20-30 clips from various voicemails, conference calls and the like from the audio.textfiles.com website.

It’s a little strange, a little jarring, occasionally transcendental. I guess the best name for it is “Listen!” because that word shows up a few times in there. The influence of the Negativland KPFA show Over the Edge should be obvious. And if it’s not… you should really check out the Negativland KPFA show Over the Edge!

Enjoy it with my compliments.

Listen!

3 Comments

Javascript Hero: A Hero Appears —

Last October, I gave a call to arms on this very weblog to help port MESS to Javascript.

Five months later, I want to share a working protoype.

So, with the caveat of it only working in the Google Chrome browser, of it only showing you a single Colecovision cartridge, and of it having no sound or keyboard input, allow me to introduce to you the working prototype at:

http://jsmess.textfiles.com/

If it doesn’t work for you, then I’ll tell you it looks like this:

The rest of this entry is just discussing the details, the repercussions, and the plans for this project. Summary: FUCKING AWESOME.

Obviously, the half-dozen people working on this project weren’t spending all waking hours in the last five months on getting us to where we are now. In a few cases, weeks went by as people lived lives, or we were waiting for someone to get off work, or just the occasional miscommunication and “oh hell, I thought you were doing the git push” sort of thing. The main project discussion, for a long time, has been here, if the nuts and bolts of the shared development project interests you.

The primary push has been to use the Javascript converter Emscripten to port MESS over to Javascript, and making that happen required a lot of bugfixes, some on the MESS side but also on the Emscripten side. It also required modifying makefiles, disabling assembly language routines, and bumping into all sorts of oddness. The primary developers of this whole project have been Justin de Vesine, Alon Zakai, and Justin Kerk, although there’s a lot more who have stuck their noses in in various fashions. Some stuck their noses in to tell us this was all impossible; the less said of those folks, the better.

The resulting Javascript file, mess.js, is 16 megabytes. Due to modern browser capabilities, it is pre-compressed down to 2 megabytes for transfer, but then it expands, and we run into the current situation that this sucker horks a ton of RAM. (In fact, it appears this does run in some versions of Firefox, but it really wrecks it when doing so, so I’m not going to count it.) This is, like I said, the prototype. We’re just working to make it function, and then we’ll expand back into making it function well and be much more efficient.

What’s important to me is that the prototype, the proof-of-concept, is an emulation of a Colecovision running a homebrew cartridge, Cosmo Fighter 2, by Marcel De Kogel. It’s a Colecovision running in a window! We chose Cosmo Fighter 2 because it kicks into a demo mode immediately, needing no keypress, so you can see the scrolling starfield and the text and the general speed of the thing right away. It bodes well. Obviously, as we head upward into more contemporary systems (the MESS emulator emulates such late-model systems as well as really old ones), the slowdown going through javascript going through a browser going through an OS may in fact be legitimate murder. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with the fault-finding.

What we have here is Pat Crowther yelling “We Have Cave!“. It’s Neil Armstrong going “Holy shit“. It is a seriously big deal and it’s going to get bigger.

I think people forget how we used to tell people how things sounded and how they looked. We used to tell people this new song was really awesome. Now we can not only link to that song, we can link to a specific part of that song. And we might have said we saw something funny or amazing on a show, and we can now embed that specific event right into a webpage, and show them. OK. you probably sort of get how incredible that is, or at least that it happens, but sit back and think again what that does: it means that items of a visual and audio nature are as ubiquitous as the words we used to describe those items. This song is awesome; listen to how awesome this song is. This dude is fucking hilarious on this show; see how hilarious he is. Or, if your bend is more academic: this bird emits a unique cry; here is the cry it emits. The algorithm results in a very interesting outcome – come see the algorithm’s visual result.

As we press forward on JSMESS, the Javascript MESS project, we’re proposing to do the same to computing experience. We’re going to make things that happened on computers into an embeddable object on computers. Yes, you can certainly download a disk image, download an emulator, run the disk image on the emulator and then be able to see an old program run, but that’s a lot different than, say, putting up 10 windows in a webpage where if you click on any of them, you can immediately see what every major spreadsheet program on the Apple II looked and felt like. It’s nothing near as awesome as being able show you how Print Shop developed over the years. Or let you see, side by side, how the Atari and the Apple version of a program behaved. Once we’re done here, it’ll be trivial, a calling with a few options, a pittance of effort. The experience of any moment of computing in the past 50 years as an embeddable object. And once we’re done with that… then we can focus on the really amazing stuff.

While the team has things under control right now, it never hurts to have a few more people hang out and see what’s going on. The work is being discussed on the EFNet IRC network, in the channel #jsmess. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, that’s fine. I’ll keep you appraised of future milestones.

Everything’s going to change.

It’s going to be very exciting.

 

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A Consideration of an Infocom Kickstarter —

Naturally, one might be inclined to look at a massive project one did, like a two DVD documentary on text adventures, and instead of remembering how you got there and how hard you worked and everything else, just see the flaws. I’ve had GET LAMP flaws held up to me on several occasions, actually many occasions, but I’m not overly embarrassed by them. They’re good flaws, the flaws that come from sticking your stake in the ground and hitting all your goals.

Besides the “focuses on North American text adventure culture and industry” flaw, which I was forced into with the footage and budget I had, there’s the “interactive version menu is fantastically clunky” flaw. I am happy to live with that one because as the DVD format sunsets out, I at least reached for the potential that was supposed to be baked into the format. But it’s hard to deal with and doesn’t work in all DVD players, and so there it is. (This is why there’s a “non-interactive” version – I just punted, hit the CTRL-FUCKIT keys, and made sure people could enjoy all the footage. I always play the non-interactive version when I screen the movie.)

There is one flaw I don’t abide by, and there was no way to see it coming.

The GET LAMP documentary DVD set has a couple secrets in it. A couple standard DVD-style easter eggs, of course, and the packaging has one, but the one that I’m talking about is the Infocom documentary. Here it is at the bottom of the main menu:

Somehow, and I blame myself, GET LAMP became in many eyes the documentary about text adventures that is the main mix but the Infocom documentary is almost never mentioned. But it’s far and away my favorite! Unlike GET LAMP in the main, Infocom (it’s called simply “Infocom”) is a very focused, very time-oriented and explanatory documentary episode, clocking in at just 50 minutes (technically 47:05), that lays out Infocom from start to finish. It is, far and away, my favorite part of the DVD’s materials. It’s a pretty straightforward piece of work, yes, but the amount of respect I have for the Infocom people and their unique place in history comes through everywhere. Sure, there’s negative things some people say, and it does get contentious here and there, but I really feel I did that company justice in that episode.

The way things are arranged, Infocom just hasn’t been something people focus on when they discuss GET LAMP, and that’s all my fault. Regardless, it’s the kind of film I’d like to see about a lot of game companies, although I don’t know how many we’re going to get.

More than that, this episode has a hilarious commentary track, with Stu Galley, Mike Dornbrook, and Dave Lebling, recorded at Mike’s apartment. I love that thing! Hanging with childhood heroes of mine, having them all interact and chum around, and drop some great trivia. I turned a personal profit on the whole project right there – it didn’t matter if I ever sold a copy.

But my whining about this hidden jewel aside, I wanted to mostly respond to an event happening out there that’s getting attention: The Double Fine Kickstarter. (I am actually kind of sad that this name refers to a fundraising venture, and not, as it should be, a drink involving twice-strained tomato juice, caffeine and vodka.)

No, the Double Fine Kickstarter was the using of the fundraising platform Kickstarter to fund a point and click adventure. They asked for $400,000 in 35 days, made that in eight fucking hours, and landed at the astounding amount of three million. Kickstarter had never had a million dollar funding before, but now they have three, this, a comic book reprint, and an iPad holder that barely squeaked into the nine-digits-club before close. And here’s the big thing: it’s to fund a point and click adventure.

Now, point and click adventures show up nowhere in GET LAMP mostly because I didn’t have space to go all the way through every derivation of the text adventure medium that came in the decades hence, but point and clicks have a strong heritage in such and for some people represent the fog-filled trailing edge of their gaming childhood. So it has been a pleasure to see so many people step forward with an interest to have a new one made… including myself, who funded at the “give me the documentary and the resulting product” level.

Therefore, let me take this moment to address the idea of an Infocom Kickstarter.

“An Infocom Kickstarter?” you say. Well, believe it or not, the concept has been mentioned to me in multiple forms, in various ways, throughout production of GET LAMP, and especially once we saw the Kickstarter concept really take off, and seriously getting into my face upon the release of the movie and Kickstarter being used to fund really wild things, computer game wise. The plan, roughly, is:

1. Get the Infocom People to make another Infocom Game

2. We play the Infocom Game forever

Rather sketched-out, really. All ready for the details. So allow me to answer it.

First of all, the idea of pulling infocom implementors out of cryosleep and giving them the ability to make another text game was done: it’s called Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. If you can imagine a performance by an established musician who’s 30 years into his career, the approach was the same: you have the warhorses doing the rough outline (in this case, Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn), while the talented younger staff does the heavy lifting (in this case, G. Kevin Wilson). From my interview with Marc Blank, he made it clear that it was a few weeks of work for him and Berlyn, along with some follow-up concalls to answer questions or add additional material as needed. This is how it went, and how I would think any future work with the original implementors would go.

I don’t think any of the creators have lost their touch – every one I talked to for the movie was bright, engaged, hilarious or thoughtful as per personality, and would no doubt be a joy to hear from in a creative manner, be it text adventures, or, frankly, a Q&A session. Faced with the challenge of writing something new, and with someone else assigned to do the dreary pick-up work with coding/development, they’d all be fine at it.

Here are some problems:

First of all, time. Multiple implementors have moved on to pretty time-consuming jobs, meaning they couldn’t just blow months working on a project, or even weeks. While a lot of the aspects of making a text adventure have been sped up (especially for QA and playtesting, where programs exist to jam through and find bugs at amazing rates) the whole ‘writing and composing puzzle’ thing would be a pretty involved experience for them, so they’d have to work on it when they could. Some are retired, certainly, while others are not involved in jobs that would prevent them from, say, blowing a few weekends on the project. I say this, fully aware that Kickstarter provides the role of Deranged Millionaire, who will pay untold sums for an infocom game, whether reality would allow one or not. I suppose everyone has their price, and faced with a hefty fee, the Infocom imps would probably be convinced to spend a little time working out some craft to make a text game, especially with the aforementioned “heavy lifting by younger staff of devs” approach.

Next, the resulting product would very, very unlikely be anything like an Infocom game as people know it – the characters and the worlds are still technically owned by Activision and they’re unlikely to loosen up any grip on them with wasting an enormous amount of money of good donating people, money that should go for, say, a gold limo for Steve Meretzky. Perhaps a game where parts of it are each lorded over by a specific implementor, say, a swamp section done by Stu Galley and an insane asylum overseen by Amy Briggs, might work. There was only one game under Infocom done in anything close to that model, and it was Bureaucracy – and I’m going to pull from my informal conversation with infocom writers to tell you that game was truly and completely hated from the inside.

I’m not saying the whole thing is a terrible idea that could never come to pass; I am pleased that we now live in a miraculous time where it’s not just possible, but feasible to raise the funds to convince the infocom alumni to go for it.  But I question what the whole idea of an “Infocom Game” truly was and is, and whether what came out the other end would satisfy the wishes of those for whom those two words are magical.

There’s my two cents. discuss.

 

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The Jason Scott Machine —

I haven’t been surprised by suggestions for documentaries I should make, but I have been surprised by suggestions for documentaries I should be making after I’ve announced I’m doing three at once. Nobody does three at once as a single person, and then people want me to do even more. I’m tagged out for some time to come in the realm of covering more subjects than the ones I am, although perhaps a few ones people want are involved in the three I’m doing. For example, 6502 is going to be covering programming in a way that I think has never been attempted before – TAPE is going in directions involving the medium that are sorely in need of coverage and haven’t been anywhere. But still, it’s not a documentary on the Demoscene (one suggestion) or Ham Radio (another) or Arduinos (that came in a while ago). So, I’ve thought about this, and I think what people are really saying is that they wish that a documentary was made on a subject of importance to them, but made in the style of the BBS Documentary or GET LAMP. Fair enough – what you really want is a Jason Scott Machine you can throw a documentary subject into and let it grind like crazy for a few years and than make this great thing. That’s certainly what’s happened before.

So, here’s a compromise.

There’s a movie coming out in just a few weeks or thereabouts. It’s called Going Cardboard, or The Board Game Documentary, and it’s directed by Lorien Green, who set off a few years back to film a movie about Euro Board Games (or Designer Board Games), the people who play them and the business behind them, especially the designers.

So, I didn’t make this film. I didn’t come up with the subject, didn’t decide who would be in it, what parts of the story would be covered, any of that. This wasn’t a movie I was making anytime soon. Or ever. But Lorien wanted to, and she asked if I’d consult. So I did, mostly giving advice here and there, and then, after she’d cut together a rough edit of the movie, I went in and did another few rounds of editing and polish. This week, we’re doing the mastering of the DVD, and then it goes off to the waiting packages that were printed a while ago. The packaging, by the way, includes a new board game by legendary designer Reiner Knizia, who appears in the movie as well as a whole host of characters.

Again, this isn’t my film, but it was definitely hooked up to the Jason Scott Machine. It has my influence here and there, and from the premiere people have already commented it has the same feel as one of my films. So there you go, a solution.

Besides buying Lorien’s film when it goes pre-sale, You should consider this option available: If you want to make a geeky film and ask for advice, here I am. If you want me to edit it or do intense work, I do charge and want to get some level of paid, but I like accomplishment-based pay, so we can chat.

I’m likely never to do the subjects that people want if I’m not already doing them (although who knows what the distant future brings) – but I can help others who want to approach them. It’s not hard to make documentaries – it’s just a long marathon and not everyone wants to run it.

Until the e-mail buzzes, I’ll stick to my load of three at once. Production began officially earlier this month, and there goes a few years of my life. Oh, and sorry for burying the lead, but there’s now a new weblog called documentary.textfiles.com that covers my work with production of these films – people who invested want updates and it’s probably not good for ASCII to get clogged up with it going forward.

See you in the docs.

 

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GODADDY SOPA BLAH —

So, very quickly. SOPA is just the latest in really stupid laws that are intended to change the very nature of online life (along with a lot of aspects of offline life) to bring the Internet in line with the “real world”, e.g., Shit.

It was made by people trying to fundamentally change how this internet thing works, in ways that it can’t possibly. Granted, a lot of people have given up internet for internet-like things, but bear in mind that a single cellphone, that is, one individual’s cellphone, running 4G, has greater bandwidth than the Internet Backbone did in the early 1990s, and you see how far we’ve gone in so short a time.

A lot of people are talking about how the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a piece of crap, and it is crap. I don’t have the interest or the taste in going deeply into that, because people who are much better at being all legal-wrangly-nutty can do it. No, I only want to speak to one thing, and even that is mostly in the realm of preservation, my big passion these days, and by “these days” I mean “that I’ve been alive”.

When what we think of as “Domain Names” started up, it was a volunteer side-effort of registering names, one done by hand and totally unreliable in terms of turnaround. You can say what you want related to what came next, but they were kind of Bad Old Days. If a domain was offensive, or they were busy that week, or anything else, you had to basically hope the forces mixed together and you got your domain name. The process of changing domain names, of doing a lot of other domain-related transactions, was weird, slow and stupid. Somewhere around there, I got my COW.NET domain, which I still have.

Network Solutions were slow-moving, unresponsive, dull assholes.  Network Solutions also had a defacto monopoly,  and once they started charging for domain name registration, you got better response, and they got a fuckton of money from domain name sales, and domains weren’t cheap. Let’s be clear about that: $50 a year.

A decent enough showing of how weird those pre-money times were is in this 1993 Wired article.  Joshua Quittner’s a bit of a toolbox but the article serves the function, so there you go. Wild and wooly, slow, and unpredictable. And after the monopoly kicked in, it was wallet-rape city – remember, Verisign bought Network Solutions in 2000 for 21 BILLION DOLLARS.

So imagine when the monopoly was broken, and a chance arose for someone, especially someone like me who’d been doing domain names for nearly a decade, to get domains much cheaper, that is, $8 a year. Well fuck yeah! Thus I and others started going to these other domain registrars, doing our best to make sure they were in some way legitimate. I went with two: EasyDNS for stuff I cared about, Go Daddy for stuff I didn’t quite care about.

So, EasyDNS is fucking perfect. Let’s leave it at that.

Go Daddy was mostly a case that they were cheap, and their interface was somewhat easier to use, especially compared to Network Solutions. Network Solutions had done some sketchy shit in the past, in one case utterly breaking DNS. At the time, if someone had put a hammer in my hand and gave me a free flight to their offices, we would have had quite the news story. In this environment, anything looked better, EasyDNS was expensive (but awesome!) and the domains I only somewhat cared about went to Go Daddy.

ANYWAY

DNS and domain name garbage are like funerals and busted water heaters. You don’t want to deal, when you come into problems it’s usually under duress, and when it’s all over you stop thinking about it until the next time.  Such as it has always been with me for Go Daddy.

Most of the time, with Go Daddy for me, it’s been “Oh, I need to register something hilarious (or somewhat hilarious – I’ve owned INAPPROPRIATELYDRESSED.COM or DISRESPECTCOPYRIGHT.ORG and many other things of that ilk), I don’t want to spend any money, I don’t care too much…. OK, off to Go Daddy.” Once I’m there, I’m reminded how much of their business is trickery, deception, misleading user interface, endless endless endless endless add-ons and attempts to make more money from you, and finally a shit-ball storage of your stuff. But in the end, the domain registers, it “works”, and I’m done, and I can go on making the joke site or whatever.

Somewhere in there, Go Daddy went from “bargain basement generic registrar” to “sleazeball make-ads-that-piss-people-off jingoistic hey look at me fuck you pussies registrar”. Now, as someone who did contract work for ROTTEN.COM as a writer and who uses “Fuck” as an adjective, I’m content with anyone being all controversy-and-tits and putting a stake in the ground, with business being gained or lost by those clear and present actions. It’s called “taking a stand”. T-Shirt Hell, which makes offensive t-shirts, had this schtick for years and has always kept that schtick – great. So it was with Go Daddy.

See, but now things have come to a head. It turned out that not only was Go Daddy happy to put their names supporting SOPA, which is a hell of a restricting, dangerous, and censoring law, but they’d helped to write some of it and, even more offensively, were exempted from it. In other words, they’d found a way to be as legally and liberty-crushing offensive as their ads and their posts and declarations were liberty-defending. In other words, hypocrites.

So, a bunch of people, including myself, are beginning to leave Go Daddy in droves. I have about 20-30 domains with them, and they’re all leaving. This process, you will not be surprised to hear, is somewhat laborious, with Go Daddy throwing ALL sorts of things in the way, including spectacularly crappy and misleading tricks (you unlock a domain to allow transfer by clicking on a menu called “Locking” and then unclicking a box that says “lock domains” and then hitting the button), and then a waiting period. Plus, I know better than to do all my domains through a process at once without testing it, so I’m only doing one minor domain first, going through the waiting period and then making sure it’s all kosher, and then off I will do the rest. Go Daddy may call me about this – I have a “celebrity” domain which they have a specific call center number devoted to. Really. And best of all, it’s Sockington.

But when they call, they can take a flying fucking leap. We’re done.

ANYWAY

When the shit rained down from the world over the SOPA thing, Go Daddy thought they would have their legal counsel explain, point by point, why they were going to say Fuck You and keep supporting SOPA. They wrote a pretty massive weblog entry, actually.

Once people really kicked in, moving tens of thousands of domains off Go Daddy, well, then the fun began, and Go Daddy announced they were “reversing” their position, and that they still saw a need for certain protections, but SOPA was apparently not it, and oh fucking god please stop leaving us in such massive droves and please we’ll do anything you want goddamnit we have children ACTUAL KIDS HERE that need clothing and shelter and we went too far.

First of all, the best part was they’d still written the law, and were still exempt, and were still officially supporting it. All they’d done is made a new weblog entry to try and placate the mouth-breathers, the utter morons they think their customers are who think the tits-and-controversy image was fucking awesome and just wait for them to no longer care about this and we can all go back to the upsells and the deception.

So, in that way, they DELETED THE WEBLOG ENTRY DEFENDING SOPA.

And so, here we are, here I am, to say, FUCK YOU, GODADDY.

Here’s your lame-ass defense, permanently enshrined. Go suck a banana. My domains are leaving you as soon as possible. I hope everyone leaves. Go into the ground, put a plastic bag over your head, and play astronaut. You’re done.

The original weblog entry you hid:

And here it is as a .zip file. (A huge thanks to Vitorio Miliano for sending this along.)

Anyway, back to my regularly scheduled Merry Christmas.

6 Comments