ASCII by Jason Scott

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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.

 

5 Comments

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.

 

2 Comments

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

Wikiwhatever (A Retirement) —

Since oh, January or thereabouts, I’ve had this entry about Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary sitting around. I actually write most of these entries as drafts and let them sit, then come back and touch them up and do what you do with actual writing. The entry sat there for a whole year, and I just deleted it, as I’d realized something.

I’m kind of done being The Wikipedia Critic. I still find issues, and the landscape is rich with targets and self-important process lawyers and all the sketchy shit Jimbo Wales and other members have done over the years, but I am just kind of done being That Guy. The one who spends time after time proving a negative, showing the problems,  then indicating why the problems are problems, and then doing it forever until I’m in the ground.

You know, for the past week, I’ve been adding a mirror of Jamendo.com onto the Internet Archive – I’m more than halfway done, and the collection will be here. When I’m done, over 971 days (real, 24-hours apiece days) of music will be on the Internet Archive servers. I’m also adding out of print comic books, more computer magazines, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

In all these cases, I didn’t add things to then watch people change the content, the meaning, and blow down a bunch of legibility rules or linking policies to essentially destroy them. They’re items. They were made. They got scanned or recorded. Here they are. A much better week, in other words, than constructing cogent arguments about process. A much better week.

These days I’m the Archive Team Guy. I’m the Archiving/Preservation Guy. My speeches are still fiery, my rage is still in effect, and my boundless need to make things better and more accessible still burns bright. It’s just getting things done now. I like being this guy. I think I’m going to stay being him.

See you in the archives.

6 Comments

Kickstarter: All I Know —

I’ve now done two kickstarters, and maybe I should talk about what I know.

If you don’t know what Kickstarter is, then either you’re being sent to this weblog entry or something’s really gone out of whack, because I’ve mentioned the kickstarter campaigns I’ve run here extensively, as well as putting up the cute widgets telling you to visit.  But for the first group, let me say that Kickstarter is a site for “crowdfunding”, or “patronage”, or as some nimrods call it, “cyber-begging”.  It is obviously much more than that to many people, but maybe that’ll get you started. The Kickstarter site has a FAQ and a few minutes of browsing will have you caught right up.

I’m mostly writing this for people who think they want to start a kickstarter or best practices crowdfunding project, or have done one and want to compare notes. I encourage all manner of comments.

So, a quick disclaimer. I know these people. I don’t know if any of them would call me a friend, but I’ll settle for “knows exactly who the guy in the hat walking up is”. And I’ve walked up a few times, either at swishy NYC digerati gatherings or SXSW or what have you. It’s always been cordial. Additionally, during a specific stressful situation in my first kickstarter that I’ll go into, co-founder Yancey Strickler answered my frantic 1am-on-a-Sunday-morning tech support e-mail within 30 minutes, solving the problem instantly, and you’ll follow someone like that into a hail of gunfire after that. So if you read nothing else, let me say, stand-up guy. Also, I have no dirt on anybody, so there’s no dirt coming out in this. I’m just giving you the facts.

I had the idea for something like Kickstarter before Kickstarter, for what’s that worth. Faced with friction from my family about setting out to doing another documentary after BBS and realizing I wanted a $5500 camera to do it, I said that I could instead raise some of that from the world at large, and the “GET LAMP Adventurers’ Club” was born. Invest $100 in me, and at some point in the future, which turned out to be four years later, you would get three copies of whatever it resulted in. I intended it to be open for a month, but I had to shut it down after 50 people came forward waving money, pushing me to $5000 and making me nervous about how many copies I was preparing to give away (i.e. 150 guaranteed copies of GET LAMP). Looking back at everything, I probably could have kept it going, but 50 was a good solid number. Oh, and they got into the credits of the film as well. If this sounds similar to kickstarter ideas, well, this sort of thing has gone on a long time. I suppose I could draw some conspiratorial idea from the fact the CTO of what became Kickstarter was in that Adventurers’ Club, but come on – ideas are everywhere, playing them out into reality is a whole other business.

In fact, let me drop what I think Kickstarter’s main secrets of success are, in case you decide you want to rip off their style, like Indie Gogo did. (Indie GoGo, open before Kickstarter, looked like this for years and when Kickstarter ate their lunch and squatted it out in gold coins, massively reskinned themselves to look so much like Kickstarter than I’ve had people surprised to hear they’re not the same company.)

Kickstarter’s main secrets are Frictionlessness and Curation.

To know what I mean by Frictionlessness, let’s blow through 20 years of Web History in less than a few sentences:  We start with holy crap it all works, followed by a few years of what the fuck is this thing, and then that awesome how do we make money by the buckets off these assholes, followed by a multi-year situation in the mid 2000s where all the clever people who went through the first decade of web and were trying to find out what to do next started major noodling on all aspects of computer-human-data interaction, which flew into wild directions. And here we are.

There’s a whole range of thinking, a lot of which I personally identify with Caterina Fake,  where we go past this or that web technology and just get back to making a computer interface and program that does a lot of stuff simply. I’m dramatically oversimplifying here, ironically. But Fake and a lot of brethren in the Cult of Simple changed how websites were expected to function. Google had done something similar way back in a big way, and yes, Xerox PARC looked into it years and years before, but the Cult of Simple said that maybe people didn’t want a fucking webpage that looked like a 32-track recorder exploded, and just wanted to make stuff happen. I happen to think that Fake was right, and people listened, and stuff got much simpler to use even though the underlying technology got more and more complicated. Someone more interested than me in the prospect can trace where these ideas take root, but I suspect the SXSW conference and wayyyy too many BOF-like parties in San Francisco helped.

Kickstarter is off-the-showroom polished in this regard – the web pages are clean without being sparse, sharp without being oblique, informative without being overwhelming. It feels like french-kissing a Nicholas Felton chart while Edward Tufte snaps photos for his personal collection. All the integration is there – ways to shove in photos, videos and links from all manner of missing-a-vowel sites, as well as the ability to BOOM! WIDGET! at the drop of a hat. Text entry boxes you could park a Smartcar in. You’re not loading up a business plan spreadsheet – you’re filling in the big friendly spaces with your dreams. And it all just works.

So if you’re filling out a kickstarter project proposal, you are in fat city – it’s awesome and represents, I guarantee you, a billion grey hairs of effort on their part to make sure the gentle amusement park ride car slides silently down the track towards potential funding success. Assuming you can make admission. Which brings me to the second secret.

Curation. Kickstarter curates everything. When it started, it was invite only. I got in because I was invited by one of the founders of ROFLcon, and I don’t know how she got one other than knowing people from ROFLcon. So people knew people knew people. This went on for quite a while, to the detriment of “just anybody” being able to start a project.  It’s not democratic and it’s not nice and it’s not particularly going to lead to out of control growth, but it worked. People adding projects were, to at least some extent, people who would push through to the end and make something of it. I’ll be the very first person to tell you I lucked out like mad on getting on the ground floor of Kickstarter.

Like a television show, Kickstarter looks really straightforward and stuff just “works” but that belies the massive amount of curation they do, which I tend to call “meddling”. For the most recent kickstarter drive I did, a meddler showed up to question my choice of rewards, my funding structure, and a few other things. No demands, mind you. Just someone getting in there with me and sending along suggestions and ideas based on their research into what works and what doesn’t, and where I’d strayed from those known quantities.  I responded to the meddler politely and I was left alone. But I’ll bet someone who has no idea what they’re doing would really have appreciated the helping hand.

What I’m saying is that projects succeed on Kickstarter because Kickstarter helps projects succeed. That may sound simple, but one could look at something like Ebay, with its endless fraud issues, terrible quantity of users who come this close to ripping you off, and million pathetic attempts to get attention, and you realize how much great work Kickstarter’s people are doing to keep the shining city on the hill from getting that broken window. Those people are doing enormous work on this silent, not-obvious front, and don’t ever forget it.

I’m sorry one of the secrets turned out to be “do hard work”, but come on, you knew that.

Kickstarter has had a number of Supreme Successes, cases where shit went so crazy that people noticed.  It’s one thing to fund a kitchen for a brewpub. But when this Obama Design Book pumped $80,000 out of what seemed like thin air, that got some major attention, and when a wristwatch adapter for iPod Nanos made nearly a million goddamned dollars, well… everyone got that concept. Personally, nothing blows my mind more than the $3,000 Jellyfish Tank project that ended up getting $162,000. I mean, woah. At this point, pretty much everyone understands that language.

So now people are flooding into the site – Kickstarter happily let people know they surpassed one million credit-card-verified backers in October. Even with the curation, projects are flooding onto the site as well. And so it’s been the case multiple times, with friends and associates, that I’ve been asked for advice or insight into the process and making things “win” the kickstarter game.

I did two kickstarter projects, here and here. You can’t possibly do the first one anymore – looking at it now, it says “Please help me raise this money, and in return, I will spend this money.” It’s cushioned by also being a way to fund the final editing of GET LAMP, and in fact I later offered copies of GET LAMP at cost to backers. But still – I don’t think they’d ever allow that past the curation stage at this point. I’d have had to rearrange things pretty significantly.

But propose to fund me being me I did, and fund me being me they did. I asked for $25,000. I got $26,658. I spent that money happily and heartily, and here I am a mere two years later doing the things I love and living a life of dreams, so the money went somewhere good. And let me say that one of the thoughtful actions that turned the tide on that funding drive was Jeff Atwood’s weblog entry about it, which sent things skyrocketing to success. Hope I fulfilled the dream, Jeff.

These days, I get requests to “help” a kickstarter either before or after it goes on the site, and the request comes in from two disparate groups I will label thusly: pals and douchebags. Nobody who’s talked to me gets to ask which group they’re in, although I will say it’s a 95-5 split, historically, so you’re safe. Probably.

To everyone, I have the general talk I give about the idea of Kickstarter. It goes something like this.

  • Since I was first on Kickstarter, they’ve changed how you get to join. It used to be invites, and now it’s applications. I am assuming your application got through. If you didn’t get through, there’s nothing I can do. If you did get through, then we can keep talking.
  • Kickstarter is not a VC that you need to convince once and snowjob into success – it’s a platform that makes fundraising easier by giving you a sexy backend (read: the tufte-felton threeway from above). In a very rare case you might drum up support from just posting the thing. But more likely, you’re just making a cool way for people you know and friends of friends and your fanbase to come in. When I did my first kickstarter, I had something like a decade of what I’d call my current public life behind me. Influx of support came from that fanbase, not from free-floating individuals on Kickstarter going “woo hoo”.
  • Generally, you want a goal number before you think of rewards. Ideally, it should be as little as possible while getting the job done.
  • Every project has a sweet spot, the one people go for. If you’re finishing a documentary, the sweet spot gets a DVD and is probably something like $50.
  • Products are easier for people to wrap their heads around than a precious set of individual “this level gets a PINK bow, THIS level gets a BLUE bow” bullshit.
  • Provide rewards that are cheap for you and impossible for your audience to otherwise get. Example: autographed cast photo, phone call with you, drum lesson from you the famous drummer, personalized voicemail message from you the crazy getting a podcast funded gal.
  • For fuck’s sake, make a video. If you don’t make a video explaining what people should expect and how much you care, you probably don’t care.
  • Have a family friend or relative who has an account who can throw some cash in at the end if you’re just under. If it’s $150 that means the difference of getting $5000 or not, I mean… come on.  Consider this a break-glass-in-emergency thing, but it’s a fact.
  • Amazon + Kickstarter will yoink 8 percent of what you make. Calculate that in, moneybags.
  • Also, if you don’t “validate” your account with Amazon Payments, it will reject incoming money after hitting a certain limit. This is what I wrote frantically to Yancey Strickler, the co-founder of Kickstarter, one early Sunday morning, and in mere minutes he responded to tell me that I shouldn’t worry, just validate the account, and Kickstarter’s servers would try again. And so I did, and they did. Thanks again, Yancey.
  • Like I said, Kickstarter will meddle at every level. They’re trying to help, don’t be a dick.
  • The initial rush of people after you announce will make you feel like the most important person in the world. You’ll want to go outside and cheek-kiss hobos, you’ll be so happy.
  • Somewhere after the initial rush, you’ll wonder what the fuck happened and you’ll kick a kitten.
  • There are a group of people, and I have no explanation for this, who will only jump in after it succeeds. Kickstarter only pulls cash if the project succeeds, so this is silly, but there you go.
  • “Kickstarter Project Starts” is a “Dog Bites Man” story in 2012. Sorry. Try and bite a few dogs, somehow.
  • Once your kickstarter starts, the real-time updates of people investing will eat your fucking existence. You’ll try and live a productive life, but the real-time aspect of people giving you money will cripple you. Sorry about that.

After that, it tends to be custom advice, like brainstorming specific unique rewards, suggesting ways they might portray the thing, asking what unique aspects they can bring to a Kickstarter campaign. Generally, the pals appreciate that. The douchebags are already trying to figure out how many e-mail blasts to send to anyone in their address book over and over until they make goal.

Now, for the part where it gets weird.

For my last kickstarter, I broke as many rules as possible.

When I made the draft form of the kickstarter campaign, and set it at 100,000 goal, and saved the draft to work on other things back in July, I got a nice little e-mail from someone at Kickstarter who I won’t name, asking if I maybe wanted to make it, maybe… $30,000? And do just one documentary? Wouldn’t that be better? I kissed him on his nose and sent him on his way. Well meaning meddling.

I put up one of the strangest pitch videos you’ve ever seen. I still get comments about it. If it seems completely off-kilter and weird, that was the intention. It’s the Blue Velvet of Pitch Videos.

(For the cinephiles in the audience, the ending shot was directly inspired by the end of the Spike Lee joint “School Daze”.)

I did a single tweet (except for one answering questions): This tweet. I didn’t post in other weblogs, didn’t write in my own weblog, and didn’t do all the stuff you’re “supposed” to do, until much later in the process.

Within two days, the pledges passed $30,000.

About halfway in, I mailed everyone who had ever bought a documentary to mention the project (and the two documentaries, as people might have known about one and not the other). This juiced the pledge off onto success.

What I’m saying is, I don’t follow my own advice. Probably good to know before you take mine.

And that’s all I know.

7 Comments

The Flood Never Ended (And a Pledge Drive) —

Still lovin’ the job at the Internet Archive.  I’m starting to forget I ever worked anywhere else and all those times I wasn’t enjoying myself.

(I actually enjoyed myself a lot at the various jobs I used to have, but it was rarely because of the job itself.)

I last posted that I’d added some materials to the archive back in September.  That list of periodicals and other materials is way out of date, kids. Let’s do a quick update.

So there’s another thousand magazine issues for you to paw through.

“What, is that it?” you say. Archivist, Please! 

How about some french-language computer magazines? I got a huge ingestion of those a while back, and I’ve been steadily adding them the last couple of months. They include:

There’s plenty more to add (over 100 different runs) but that’s ongoing.  Spanish and German collections are arriving as well.

But who the hell wants to read, you say. What you want is some sort of software.

Yeah, on that as well.  In the Shareware CD Archive I’ve been curating,  I took the thing from an embarassing 35 CD-ROMs to the current count of roughly 761 CD-ROMs, including a massive collection of FREEBSD installationCD-ROMs courtesy of a donor from the Noisebridge hackerspace. They were going to be turned into wall art, and someone on their list said “Maybe swing those by Jason, first?” so here we are with a pretty much complete set of CD-ROMs from FreeBSD version 2.0 up through 5.4 – a motherlode of unix and programming history.

With this latest batch, it is my firm belief that archive.org is now the largest collection of historical shareware on the internet. I would love to be proven wrong, just so I can make things right the only way I know how, by absorbing even more into the archives.

The full GET LAMP Interviews are still coming in, although they tend to hose the machine that’s doing the rendering, due to the High-Def and the noise reduction and all the rest. But they are getting done! Interviews were added for David Shaw,  Lucian Smith, and the one and only Don Woods.  Additionally, all the footage I shot in the cave that Adventure is based on is now online in a big pile, and the High-Def version of the MC Frontalot video I shot snuck on one evening.

Other dumps include the 2010 @Party Demoparty Footage, the ROFLcon Summit presentations including this one with me and Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive, and terabytes and terabytes of Yahoo! Video.

Wow, STILL not satisfied? Fine, I whip out the best for last.

The DNA Lounge in San Francisco makes webcasts available of performances going on at the club. All the performances. All the time. Since they re-opened in 2002.  Well, people who care have been saving those webcasts. They sent the webcasts to me, on a hard drive.

So here you go: Over 2,000 performances of acts at the DNA Lounge over the last 10 years. This is over 10,000 hours of music, spoken-word, DJs, breakdowns, triumphs and musical madness. Ten thousand hours.

While you’re eagerly browsing the acts and checking out the years,  let me now make an appeal to you.

The Internet Archive is amazing. Besides the massive amount of data I just dumped there, there’s many other groups adding untold quantities of books, sounds, video and whatnot. Top among that is the Internet Archive itself, which I calculated out as adding a new digitized book every 90 seconds to the site. Seriously. They’re adding that many, that fast. To do this, they have a very small staff, and the costs of the archive, while a massive bargain for what it does, still means that they have to always be on the lookout for new donations, new underwriters, all that stuff that comes along with providing this service, a service that includes the unique and amazing Wayback Machine.

So this year, the Archive is trying a pledge drive. Here’s the pledge drive page.  Donations to the archive are potentially tax deductible depending on where you live.

I just threw over 25 terabytes of material at you. Try throwing 25 bucks back.

And thanks.

6 Comments

Dear Brian —

My somewhat legitimate position in the world as speaker, historian, archive dude and rabblerousing mascot means that it probably doesn’t do me any favors to do my really too easy to do slam of other people, out of the blue. But you know, sometimes I can’t help myself.  I wrote about this, sort of, a while ago. But I said I wouldn’t do the jib-jabbery thing. Now I will do the jib-jabbery thing.

Way back when I was working on the BBS Documentary, in fact, before I was even shooting, which makes it around 2001, I knew that I needed a lot of help on the back-end when it came to research.  So, besides reaching out to Slashdot, I also brought in a lot of friends and made myself very available. This availability went on through the entire three years of shooting. One of the ways was a mailing list called “Co-Sysops” where I had a bunch of computer types who knew their stuff, and I’d fling out an obscure question like “What was the highest baud you can make a USR do” or “Does anyone know who wrote X” and then, more often than not, people answered. One of the people on this list was Brian Dear.

It would be really good to present the scale of the endeavor. With no previous major filmmaking experience, I had assembled a 500 person list of “possible to interview”, hundreds of my own “definites”, and, over the course of filming, sent out something like 3,000 e-mails. Really. The resulting epic was, in my mind, a miracle that it actually happened. And to this day, I get mail from people stumbling onto it online, or through the website, or any of a bunch of other ways, and the general consensus is “oh wow”, with a dash of “wtf”.

Now, during this time, Brian Dear explained he should be one of the people to interview. He lives just outside of San Diego, and twice my travels took me near there, and on two occasions, I mailed him about an interview. No response. Again, keep in mind he was subscribed to the Co-Sysops list, which itself had me going “I’m heading out to ______ for a week to film.”. In other words, he had an enormous amount of chances to make it happen. I was very confused by this all at the time.

So the movie finally came out in May of 2005, a happy time all around for me. Happy, that is, except for one or two annoyances, specifically, a spontaneous appearance from Brian in the comments about the CD.TEXTFILES.COM project, where he says:

“Still mystified why Jason seems to have decided to exclude the whole Coconut story from his BBS Documentary. The Coconut era (COCONET, CocoTalk API, CocoMedia; radically different software from everything else on the market at the time — client/server architecture; EGA/VGA graphics only, with eventual Mac/Win support; first BBS to offer embeded graphical emoticons, which are now so common on web-based BBS’s); Unix-based, not DOS/Windows based) is an important chapter in the whole BBS drama, and no matter what the excuse, his history project will remain incomplete without coverage of it.”

What a twerp!

ANYWAY, the reason I bring this up is because Brian has his own little favorite subject, that of the PLATO system, which the BBS Documentary does mention and which is quite an enjoyable little history of its own. Enjoyable enough, in fact, that Brian decided to write a book on it.  In fact, he’s been working on this book for years and years and years. In at least one bio he claims 20 years of research, although if we’re going to play that little game I’ve been doing BBS research for 32 years.  Regardless, he’s been working on it for FOR-EVER.

For years, the only updates on his regular site about this project was to mention when someone he’d interviewed had died.  However, he eventually did come out with a date: the book would be released Fall of 2010.

Well, it’s 2011. In the time since Brian slammed me for having an incomplete history of BBSes, I shot, edited, and released another film and now I’m shooting three more. The Computer History Museum has switched from the Visible Storage structure they had to an amazing, world-class museum setup of their materials. (I got a tour this year. Trust me, it’s worth going to if you’re within 100 miles of the place. A 1000 miles!)

Why am I saying all this? Like I said, it doesn’t help me all that much as I work on all the stuff, but every once in a while I see this dude’s name, I see that the book covers something other people haven’t covered, and something in me just snaps. The world is full of people fat-fingering their cheeto-stained keyboards with how you’re failing to be perfect, not achieving your potential, and that you shouldn’t have even tried.  The advantage of them all dying in a fire is how long the fire would burn.

Hopefully this book will come out soon – I’ll be sure to get a copy.  Until then, I’m going to get actual shit done.

8 Comments

The Typewriter Test —

This past week, I went to visit my friend Chris Orcutt to test out the equipment I bought for the three documentaries I’m shooting. While I had already spent a lot of time researching what to get and had purchased 99% of what I needed, I wanted to do a dry-run shoot and see how it was working with it all in a “real” environment.

With three documentaries being shot at once, I didn’t want to skimp on the equipment, and I sure didn’t: A Canon 5D Mrk II, with a collection of L series of lenses. I got a great microphone, and because it’s not really wise to use the audio that comes with the camera itself, a separate digital recorder.

If there’s one thing I would inform anyone getting into shooting something like a documentary, it’s this: you really have to know the equipment cold. And the way you do that is to shoot dry-run days of something nearby and repeatable, be it a friend, a backyard, a pet. I chose a friend. Chris has a couple really nice manual typewriters, so we decided he’d set up a workstation in his living room and we’d do some shoots over an afternoon.

The resulting film is this:

You can go to the Youtube page here.

 

There’s no scripting or pre-planning, and I’m just talking with him and coming up with where to go next. All told, I shot about 30 minutes of footage, recorded 40 minutes of audio. I could have made this three times as long (we did discuss typewriters a bit), but I just wanted to show people where I was going with the look, the feel, the approach to the filming.

I think there’s no question the new equipment looks better than GET LAMP did, although GET LAMP looked much better than BBS Documentary did. Obviously there’s a lot more to a documentary than the pretty shots and the sound, but it sure helps when I’ve gotten a rare interview with a historically important figure to know they’re going to look really, really good. Also, the camera setup itself is very small and light, so readjusting things for a different shot is quite trivial, as is recording sound all the time during a shoot to get statements in between camera shots.

One critical thing to mention, to anyone reading this who will use a camera and sound setup with separately recorded sound, or multiple camera angles, is a program called PluralEyes.  To synchronize up even a handful of camera shots and recorded audio would be tedious and prone to error – in the case of my shot footage, the software synchronized all my video and audio in 40 seconds. I can’t recommend this program enough. It’ll pay for itself in a day of work.

Here is what the editing arrangement looked like for this relatively short film (I continue to edit in Vegas, Version 11 nowadays):

If you look along the bottom, you can see the whole timeline from start to finish. The greyed-out track is the original camera audio, which I don’t use in favor of what was recorded with the Zoom H4N digital recorder and the Seinnheiser microphone. Places where there are two tracks are audio are where you hear the typing in the background.

Even though this is a basic little film, it has over 40 editing points. I probably spent an hour putting it all together.

The workflow is different, but I think it’s obvious this new set of films are going to really look fantastic.  Here’s hoping.

Oh, one last thing: Chris Orcutt is a full-time writer, and he just completed his newest novel, the first of a detective series. Called A Real Piece of Work, I devoured the thing in two days and loved it. When he sells 1,000 copies, he’ll release the second in the series, so I have a vested interest in letting as many people know about it as possible. You can read up about it at www.dakotapi.com.

6 Comments

Building a Cast List —

I like to think one of the real distinct aspects of the technical documentaries I’ve done so far are the cast lists – the list of interviewees that I pull from to get the story the documentary is aiming for. In more standard situations, the cast lists tend to be rather small and have a few “big names”, a couple “experts”, and then a whole lot of still frames. I don’t work that way. BBS Documentary had 205 interviews, GET LAMP had about 80. I suspect that the three new documentaries will have at least 300 interviews, but who knows how it’ll all shake out.

(I successfully got funded, by the way. Thanks, everyone.)

Oh, and the places they’ll go! The worlds I’ll combine, the subjects that they’ll cover! It’s going to be quite an amazing spectrum.

To help myself, I have a number of utilities and tools to keep track of things. Among them is something I call the Cast Constructor, a very simple shell script that lets me make a bunch of flat files with potential names. It’s very much a sketchpad, and not meant to be a definitive list, or a fully accurate one, or ever a complete one. It just lets me get some ideas out.

All three of the documentary sites now have cast sketches. Here they are:

http://www.arcadedocumentary.com/cast

http://www.6502documentary.com/cast

http://www.tapedocumentary.com/cast

I’m opening up these to the world much earlier than I normally would, because of several factors. First, I want to share as much of this approach I’m doing with three concurrent documentaries as much as possible – I don’t know if a single person has ever attempted this before. Second of all, with such a massive spectrum of potential subject matter, I want to invite people to mail me at cast@textfiles.com with cast ideas. It would help me a lot if you added the word “CAST:” to the subject line of your message.

People have been writing in like crazy, and I’ve been adding folks as fast as I can, often to the detriment of details. Over the next few months, I expect all three cast lists to expand greatly in size. Not everyone will get interviewed, not everyone will even be contacted – but this is one of the ways I try to improve the production, by letting people tell me who I should interview before I start shooting, and not in the lobby of the theater.

Have fun brainstorming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 Comments

Escalation —

So, here’s how this goes.

By my very, very rough estimation, I probably engage in about three thousand transactions related to my projects in a given year. This consists of people who need information, people who want me to send them something, people who want to send me something, and so on – the normal back and forth of doing what it is I do. (I’m not counting mailing out the DVDs of the documentaries – that’s pretty basic.) Some of these transactions are as simple as responding with a number, and some of them are taking possession of materials and doing stuff with them. The latter take longer.

Most of these, I get done somewhat quickly, enough that I get complimented for it. But that’s definitely not the guaranteed situation – I’ve had cases of months getting back to people. I apologize, I try to make up for it somehow, but it does happen. I owe probably a half-dozen e-mail interviews, a couple pieces of hardware need mailing, I promised I’d get back with ideas about someone’s new business or to answer a tough question about the proliferation of various types of media in backup processes…. a bunch of stuff.

Some of this is just me wanting to get stuff right, and some of it is just some minor aspect, my saying “well, I can’t just leave it at that“, and then weeks go by.

Somewhere a ways back, I had a bunch of people involved in the Geocities Torrent, where Archive Team had generated this 647gb collection that uncompresses to about 900gb, and which basically requires a hard drive of its own to really keep a copy of. Some people started torrenting it, and we also ran into some hilarious case sensitivity issue.. and, well.. anyway, so all of it is now up on archive.org if you want a copy. (Hint, it’s huge.)

A number of people mailed me hard drives, about 10. I put a copy on their hard drives, and then mailed them back. Except one.

He was supposed to mail it in February, according to my records.

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 13:55:46 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

sounds good... give me a mailing address, I'm headed to the post office
shortly anyway...  I'll drop in a label and money for return postage, much
appreciated.  I'd be mailing a 1gig external usb... I'll delete any data,
but the only data is from your torrent download anyway... :)

But things being what they are, he ended up not mailing it until a month later.  These things happen.

Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 15:58:00 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

Hi.. I completely forgot to ship this, put it in my trunk, then forgot it.
Anyway, shipped now (see attached).  However in my haste I forgot to put in
a return label/postage/and something for your time.

Have you got a paypal addy?  If so I'll send some cash there.  If not, I'll
send out a money order, let me know.  Have a good weekend.

Best, Tim

The drive arrived on March 7th.

This drive was in a slightly different form factor than the others, and at the time I didn’t have a dock to put it into, so no way to really read it. I did eventually buy a dock, but only recently. Money was pretty tight for a while (I was unemployed) so I couldn’t really put anything towards a dock and the rest, so the project kind of laid dormant.

The hard drive owner, Tim, mailed me about it, a couple times. I’m sure if I looked at that whole mail spool at the time, I was doing literally dozens of other things.

Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:24:45 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

so what's the status of things?

 

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:35:49 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

no word?  This is surprising, thought all was cool... Am I going to get the
stuff or not?  Offered to send you some paypal... what's up?

Long time now since the HD arrived.  I'd appreciate letting me know what the
status is.

Tim

“Long time” in this case was 11 days. Not long for me, and as I guess I indicate next, I was also travelling at this time – I had just spent a week at GDC 2011, and was about to go spend another week down in Austin, TX for SXSW, and had spent no time at home between them. So things were now out of sync.

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:50:51 -0400
From: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>
To: Tim

Traveling, back Sunday.

Here was my first mistake, because even if I was back Sunday, I was then stuck not only catching up with a pile of things needing my attention, but I was now going to start employment, and dealing with more travel and projects coming up. I’ve gone from being able to get things working on something like a hard drive, and doing the transfer of material, to heading down a path of more and more complicated projects. I am, in other words, fantastically busy.

Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 18:00:30 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Assume you're back and have been back.  What appreciate the status please?
Tim

 

Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2011 23:31:28 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

this going to happen, or I shall chalk it up to life experience?

 

Here is, looking back, where it goes off the rails. Something about the tone, combined with the work I’m doing, and the whole situation, means that the priority this whole thing has, to go out and get the dock and find the hard drive with my copy of the torrent on it, and then to do the copy, and all the rest, drops noticeably. I’m focused on a lot of things, and something about “chalk it up to life experience” just makes my face scrunch. My mistake was then not just sending the drive back, saying “ah, look, it’s just taking forever”, and then knowing it would be up on archive.org soon anyway.

No, instead of that, I end up doing a non-committal “mmmmm”, e-mail style, which means “Look, yeah, I’m going to get to it, but I’m in the middle of a lot of stuff and I can’t set aside the day to set this all up, OK, just relax.” but probably comes off as “yeah, yeah”.

Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2011 00:40:48 -0400
From: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>
To: Tim

It'll happen.

Now in the low priority bin, Tim is left to flail. Again, my fault. And here, well, here you can watch what happens.

Date: Tue, 3 May 2011 16:04:12 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

my 30 day check in... any updates? T

 

Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 20:19:40 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

so now I don't even get a reply?  If it's not going to happen, then
please return the HD so I can put it to use.  I'm not certain at this
point if you're simply too busy, have forgotten me, or it's something
else.  You are the one that suggested your doing this, I have not
asked otherwise.

I need the files, my HD or pay me a fair price for the HD and keep it.
 Any of the three, but c'mon man, no word is just not right.

T

 

Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 17:41:50 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

I won't bother you again then... IF (and I doubt it) you want to do the
right thing, get in touch.  I've lost faith in you and this, so keep the HD
and the files, I'll find a Unix guy and get the torrent myself.  I really
thought you were honorable (doing the torrent and all) but WAY too much time
has past, this is a very sour deal.

Enjoy the HD (life lesson for me).

Tim

 

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:29:01 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Happy July 4th... As the fireworks explode... think of all the honest, good,
hard working Americans who lived and died for this country.

Then think of those who NEVER follow through, who make promises they never
keep or intended to keep, who take merchandise under false pretense, who
ruin the integrity and spirit of the net...

Have a good weekend.

Tim

 

Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:48:02 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

just thought I say hi and let you know I haven't forgotten you.  One day...
in some way... you will be repaid.  Dishonesty is too nice a word for
you...  Have a happy holiday season... NOT.

 

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:03:47 -0600
From: Tim 
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Happy holidays thief.  Hope Santa chokes on your cookies. :)

 

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:10:43 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

see you on kickstarter, I'll be sure to follow you  CLOSELY.. and help
out with comments whenever I see your name online.  $100k... yet you
rip me off, hard to believe.  .

 

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:14:44 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

ah ha... I see Kickstarter has a link for "reporting projects"..
wonder what I can stir up by pasting our long thread... we'll see if
you respond or not. Sweet dreams. Tim

 

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:16:46 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

even better.... think I'll donate $10 so I can comment about the
project... social media... love it.

 

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:39:13 -0600
Subject: kickstarter project
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

This is Tim, the guy whom you do not answer at my main email (
XXXXXX).  Here are two options.

*1.* Return my money via paypal (it seems you have PLENTY of money now).
The money I speak of is the cost of the hard drive I purchased and mailed
to you (at your request).  The cost of my postage to send it.  The
frustration you have caused over a LONG period of time.  We'll call it $200

or

*2.*  I will do my utmost to share our complete and long thread with
(including many quotes from you saying you would fulfill your promises)
with the Kickstarter administration as well as becoming a small partner and
sharing my comments (and links to the full thread) in your section.

Your choice, all I want is to resolve this

To be clear... at this point I am ONLY interested in the return of cash,
the hard should remain in your possession.

You may use XXXXXXX as the Paypal email and IF the funds are
received promptly, this will bring this matter and our communications to an
end.  If not, then (see #2 above).

Best,

Tim

 

It’s an interesting study, to say the least. I’m hardly blameless, and the whole thing going off the rails as far as it did is definitely my fault. But the gentle traipsing into blackmail and sinister threats are also prime demotivators to following through, so I decided to split the difference. Post it all here, let you see how not every person who deals with me is 100% satisfied, and then, when I get back to my home office later this week after Thanksgiving, find the drive, mail it back, and never think about it again. Perhaps not the best solution, but about what I’m into doing, all things considered.

And to my other friends who I owe a few things for, I’m sorry for the delay. It happens.

I’ll do my best to improve.

28 Comments