ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

I Can Convert Your Betacam SP Tapes —

As part of my work for the Game Developers Conference as historian and archivist, I have been given their entire backlog of recorded conference tapes. Many of them have not seen the light of day since they were recorded – others were converted to RealMedia format, and then guess what happened next. We’ve been holding off on me doing more weblog entries while I slam through the backlog and they switch hosting servers, but I’ve been busy in the meantime. Here’s the tapes I’ve completed in the last month:

There’s lots of great material in there – presentations, panels, contests, performances – and they’ll all hit the light of day. I promise. But as I go through the next phase of tapes, the remainder of the piles, it occurred to me there would be great advantage to offering to the world a chance to convert some BetacamSP tapes, if you have them.

If you’re not sure what those look like, here’s the two form factors of BetacamSP that fit in this machine:

Just to complete the show and tell, the BetacamSP machine, the Sony UVW-1800, and the whole setup looks like this:

So, what exactly am I offering here?

Well, my theory is that there are a lot of folks out there with a few of these tapes – either a one-off handed to them from someone dumping materials, or which a company or companies paid a creator to make a bunch of years ago. You don’t want to go through all this effort to get this setup together just to do a few tapes – well, here I am. I want to see history saved, and these tapes are not getting younger. Most of the GDC tapes I have, in fact the straight majority, are 100% fine, but a few aren’t as hot as they could be. I want to make sure other folks don’t have one-off tapes that they can’t get to.

Digitizing the way I do produces a .ts file, which almost everything can deal with – it’s basically MPEG-2 format. I’m finding files between 1-4 gigabytes, very manageable, and from which all sorts of other formats can be derived.

Additionally, I can see about having your .ts file go right to archive.org, where you can point everyone to it, upload a copy to Youtube, describe what it is, the whole deal.

So, if you are finding this via a web search or another method, hi. Contact me at betatapes@textfiles.com and we’ll see about saving your magnetic memories.

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Jason Scott: Shareware Calvacade —

There’s fast, there’s ultra-fast, and then there’s the speed at which Adrian “IronGeek” Crenshaw has rendered out and uploaded the full talks from his first annual Derbycon hacker and security conference. As it was, and due to an extremely silly scheduling conflict, I could only attend the first day of the conference, and because of a series of late flights and missed connections, I got in so late on Thursday that during Friday I had to take a 2 hour nap just to be functioning for my 7pm talk.

But regardless, I got my chance to present a new speech, Jason Scott’s Shareware Calvacade, and he has it up on youtube.  Here you go:

Here’s a direct link.

This really is just a fun little speech, mostly providing an overview of the history of Shareware, some wild tangents, and some weird images of the computing past. It’s not infused with the weight of responsibility or an overarching theme – it was meant to be a pleasant post-dinner (or pre-dinner) collection of Neat Crap, meant to inspire people to my big works coming down the pike from my Internet Archive work. I hope it does that, as well as allow me to scream at an Acer Laptop and tell the Worst X-Box Live Joke Ever.

One thing I do want everyone to bring out of it is how I’m looking for more material for CD-ROMs and software in general! Don’t hesitate to contact me if you think you have some lying around and want it to live again as an exhibit or archive.

I’d like to thank the Derbycon folks for an amazing time, even if I truncated it, and to congratulate them on their wild success (the convention was sold out, and filled to the brim with awesome folks).  Next year, I’m there the whole way through!

 

 

4 Comments

A Cloud of Opinion —

As is often the case with Reddit, some random user randomly linked to one of my weblog entries. In this case, the Fuck the Cloud entry. And as is often the case with Reddit these days, it smeared any previous record of hits I ever got on the weblog, ever, since I started doing this, and I had my top reading day ever: 41,000 users in a 24 hour period (and another 6,000 the next day).

And as is typical, people found ways to discuss every possible interpretation of the entry and every possible interpretation of everything not the story: the color scheme, my sex life, my age, my resume, my own use of “cloud-like” services, you name it. Opinion Spectrum Collapse Disorder – I coined it!

Much more interesting was a little rumble of second-wave folks finding me and addressing me, ones who missed the whole thing the first time and maybe missed me all this time, and who came to me for more. And of that, there was WebProNews.

WebProNews would not normally be the type of entity I would either browse, or even think about – caked with ads, resembling a horse-racing call-sheet more than a website, this place creates tons of news stories with a perky host, and posts almost every day, giving you ads and sponsor links galore while providing content.  But for some reason, when they asked about talking Cloud with me, I said yes.

I did it over Skype, which was damned convenient, although maybe with my hair such a mess I should have worn a hat.  On the other end was a lady with a notepad and a green screen, whose name was Abby Johnson (No, not that Abby Johnson), and damn if she wasn’t one of the best interviewers I’ve ever had, save for Kevin Poulsen.  She asked all sorts of good questions, gave good followup responses, and took the conversation all over the place.

So here, in a rare show, I link you to two versions of the same video on WebProNews:

Instead of Ranty-Go-Bragh Jason which is what we usually get related to the Cloud, this is thoughtful, measured Jason, a rare sight indeed, like two unicorns chained together with goblin gold. I figure faithful readers deserve to see it. If you just want the video, you can click on the little chain at the bottom of the video window and grab the whole thing, like I did.

Great job, Abby. It’s rare indeed I link to such a site like that, but such respect deserves my respect.

P.S. Fuck the Cloud.

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Trailer for the Two Hands Project Documentary —

In two entries (one and two),  I mentioned I was editing the Two Hands Project, which is a documentary on hackerspaces.  I also, I hoped, made it clear that there’s a ton of priorities before it, including finishing editing work on the Going Cardboard documentary, and, you know, all this stuff with terabytes of data going up on archive.org.

I was asked a while ago to give a presentation/talk at the CT Hackerspace in Watertown, CT.  Somewhere in there, it morphed into “Jason will talk about the two hands project documentary and show some work”, and I thought, you know, I really should at least cut together a trailer for the thing, since I have all the footage right there. So, two hours later, I did it, and showed it at the CT Hackerspace. And now you can see it too:

It was just a couple hours work, so no big deal, but it probably does a good job of showing just how much variation and footage that gang of guys shot in those 30 days.

Enjoy!

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GET FAILURE —

A new review of GET LAMP has been posted, and it is not positive.  (Here’s a WebCitation link).

I won’t even pretend to claim much knowledge of Auntie Pixelante, because I don’t really have much beyond having followed the weblog for the site for about a year, and keeping track of a lot of the tools and assisting programs that are cited there, stuff that gets you out and running if you have some ideas for a game.  Lots and lots of embryonic game ideas come out of that place, so it’s pretty easy to just sit back and enjoy the feed. I didn’t notice the review until my RSS scanner that looks for mentions of the movie kicked it up, but then I saw it in my regular newsreader, so destiny was at hand.

I also won’t pretend to definitively summarize the review in a way that you shouldn’t read it completely; but I’ll take a shot at saying the review is primarily one of disappointment at my focus on Infocom, lack of coverage of the more experimental aspects of interactive fiction, and a monolithic point of view with Infocom constituting the majority of discussion or subject matter in the movie.

Why am I linking to/bringing attention to a negative review? Because the fact is, it’s a review. More than that, it’s a specific call-out to a perspective on the film, and yes, ultimately disappointment that that perspective feels unfulfilled, and there’s just not been that many for GET LAMP, even as we pass a year of release. I know tens of thousands of people have seen the work, and I have seen people write about text adventures and mention they saw GET LAMP, but there’s only a tiny handful of actual film criticism aimed at the work, and that’s always made me a bit sad.

I did go to film school, after all, and part what got drummed into me was the idea that film criticism is part of the process of a film – after it’s finished, after the ballyhoo and the screenings and the promotion would come informed, thoughtful essays as to what the whole thing meant or what meanings and ideas could be teased from the work that the creators either intended or unconsciously added along the way. To that end, I’ve just had very little in that direction. The BBS documentary got some, but even then, nothing even approaching the gold standard of film criticism, which is this article.

And so for me the whole thing is incomplete until it gets reviews, essays and thoughts, good and bad, and any move in that direction pleases me, so thanks to Auntie Pixelante for this review.

And as for the review?

Well, on the charge of “seems way focused on Infocom”, totally guilty as charged. Infocom is so important to the story of interactive fiction that besides a healthy mention in the middle of the main GET LAMP movie, there’s a whole other 40 minute movie called EXAMINE INFOCOM on the disc that covers Infocom and Infocom, Infocom, Infocom. On the second disc, I have extended bonus features discussing nothing but Infocom’s Z-Machine, the unique aspects of Planetfall and a whole other host of Infocom-ish subjects. That’s a fact. Book me.

I’ll take issue with the portrayal of the film as monolithic in opinion – as mentioned Chris Crawford gets a few shots in, but even across other people like inky, Adam Thornton, Andrew Plotkin and Ron Martinez, the entire medium and its failings come in for some shots, and the question of “what’s next” comes up. But, and this is the important aspect that I think is missed, this documentary bootstraps you from nothing about text adventures to going into incredibly detailed discussions of the nature of puzzles and the issues of overflowing object tables with irrelevant descriptions in the name of “realism”, as well as a host of other ethereal subjects that come down to unique problems of the collision of writing with this whole game/experience thing. The movie, that is, is not for people long off the beaten path of game design seeking ever more whacky and up-ending paradigms in the demolishing of current expectations of the very nature of interactive writing – this movie is meant to be a ground-up bringing in of the idea of text adventures and what it all might have meant, from both the idea of an industry and what would draw people to the present day to keep creating in it long after the commercial interest has receded back into the ocean.

There’s a point of view that has occasionally come in, which I call the Mass Effect group, although it’s not directly tied to that specific game, but along the lines of “Why didn’t GET LAMP cover Mass Effect/Bioshock/Cryptozookeeper”. It’s considered a missed opportunity that I didn’t draw a direct, bold line from the text adventure medium into these modern works, but I didn’t think that was the job of this film. It wasn’t even the job of the film to cover point and click games like King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, or The Last Express. I thought that there was no video documentary covering text adventures, and I do believe I was right. In terms of the “coverage” the review mentions, that’s all generally written interviews (and usually just of Steve Meretzky), or essays and recounting of artifacts. If there is another film, television production or even audio production with Amy Briggs, Stu Galley and Marc Blank all discussing their work and the general aspects of the text adventure medium, I’ll be down at Cafe du Chapeau chowing down.

What I was worried about was that all these great folks would pass on without portraying the emotion of the work they were doing, and that this community of text adventure writers, which in some ways is always on edge to tearing itself apart, would fade into self-containment without their work reaching a wider audience. For that, I say mission accomplished. Expecting it to then go on past an hour and a half into realms still experimental, or even attempt to bring in the full parallel line of related game approaches, was just not in the cards, and I hope the next text adventure documentary someone makes covers that.

Thanks for the review!

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FaceLift (A Single Image) —

I don’t normally post “up to the minute” entries, but what the heck. Today, Facebook announced it was changing up, completely, how you interact with Facebook, including a whole range of profile adjustments, retrieval of random items from the past, and a whole new range of “partners” who will be shoving items into Facebook (and, ostensibly, taking a lot more customer data out).  One such partner is the social media weblog Mashable, which wrote a jaw-to-floor lauding of the new Facebook  as changing the face of social media. It’s something when such craven, transparent logrolling is considered standard operating procedure.

I have no interest in writing more than I did in FaceFacts, except that I was browsing the Facebook weblog and saw this single, enlightening snapshot of conversation below it:

Kaitlin works the registers at a Legoland. Jonathan is director of business development at a spanish-language “hot deals” site that has an application on Facebook that gives you the latest bargains and fills your timeline with offers throughout the day.

Kaitlin is unhappy. Jonathan is delighted. Kaitlin feels unease and discontent at what is happening. Jonathan tells her to change or die.

I suppose I could go on, but it would be redundant.

Enjoy your future.

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The Next Documentary —

The Next Documentary is actually three documentaries, and one of those documentaries is six documentaries.

Now, you would think with my job at the Internet Archive and all my other projects and endeavors, I wouldn’t be into making another documentary. You especially would not expect me to be making three at the same time. Well, here we are, with me opening a Kickstarter campaign asking for pledges towards the budget of this triple threat project. So let me explain out a few things on that Kickstarter page – or you can just click on the widget above and watch my pitch film, which might rank as one of the stranger ones in Kickstarter’s scant history.

Over the next few weeks I am guaranteed to write more about these subjects, these projects and related aspects of mounting these productions. But for now, I’ll just leave this link here and ask you to check it out. Thanks.

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The Sound of Pirate Radio —


Part of my work with the Internet Archive is writing weblog entries about parts of the whole crazy collections they have to expand knowledge of the mission out to greater realms of folks. I considered writing one on this exhibit/collection but decided it was just a little too far this side of weird, so it won’t go on the official Internet Archive weblog, even though it really should.

Since the 1990s, a fellow named Sealord has been recording pirate radio broadcasts coming across shortwave bands. Without authorization, license, or any sort of oversight, all manner of folks have been broadcasting illegal but probably not overly immoral shows out into the air. This collection, which is over 11 gigabytes and counting, has hours and hours of radio broadcasts, crackling with the sound of distant voices shouting over static and electromagnetic corruption. With names like XYZ Digital Pirate, Wolverine Radio, Whispery ID, Thinking Man Radio, The Voice of the Last DJ…. you’re talking some strange and mysterious personalities out there. (I learned that this beautiful, terrifying thing has been lurking on Internet Archive’s servers from Corqspy.)

Clicking on them is, of course, a total crapshoot, just like if you’d dialed into these places from your rig. And there’s just so much of it, I have no idea what you’ll find buried in there. But what a miracle it is that someone would take the time to record them, record when they got the shows, and then we’d have something like the Internet Archive to allow people to browse this stuff far beyond its ethereal nature and point in time!

Check it out.

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Archive Team Talk Post-Mortem —

There’s enough going on both behind the scenes and onstage with the Archive Team talk at DEFCON, I think it functions on multiple levels as an explanation of speaking techniques, how I design presentations, and what the approach was for it.  You really should have watched the speech before reading this entry – here’s the entry on this weblog about seeing the video. I’ll assume you have, and move on.

General Hardware/Software/Stage

The hardware was an HP laptop that’s pretty much on the outs, but can handle flipping through images well enough. (I’ve had it for 4 years or something.) The tux was rented in Las Vegas from Tuxedo Junction, a firm just off the strip that will suit you up in under half an hour, and will often just send you out with your outfit (and top hat, which I also rented), and even has a service where they’ll send someone to pick the tux up from your hotel concierge. A tuxedo just brightens up the whole room – check out me and Schuyler Towne:

I mostly wanted to have formal wear for my presentation because I’d asked for, and gotten, the Penn and Teller Theater, which I imagined would be a fantastic venue and was not disappointed. The video doesn’t have establishing shots or anything, but it just looks and feels fantastic in there, as great as many Broadway theaters I’ve been in as a patron, so being on stage was just stellar.

I use OpenOffice Impress for my presentation software. I’ve switched to LibreOffice on my new laptops, but it’s essentially the same thing. It has everything I need, and I can work with it really quickly. It used to crash a lot, but now it rarely crashes, and I’ve never had a crash during a presentation.

DEFCON handled the recording, the sound setup, the video setup. I wore a lav mic that had a wire coming from it (the organizers of DEFCON have apparently sworn off wireless microphones in this environment), and there was also a microphone on the podium, which picked me up occasionally. I thought it all went off smoothly.

All my favorite speeches have me standing next to a massive screen that dwarfs me, and this was a good example of that – I could stand near it and point to things or just dance next to the image, and you got to see both in action. Here’s a shot of that:

If I had to come up with anything I didn’t like of how the speech went off, it’s that I drink a lot of water – maybe it was the combination of the Las Vegas heat and wearing such an elaborate outfit, but I had to keep drinking water, which took up one of my hands. But I can live with this.

Content/Arc

Okay, I do not recommend this for most speakers, and it’s not the way that should work for most people, but if it’s not obvious from the video, I have absolutely no speaking notes. No cue cards, no prompter, no notepad with words, nothing. Everything is being said from memory, or made up on the spot, or being prompted by the slides.

There’s two talks I do, primarily: One where I am acquainted with the subject, and one where I am aware of the subject. The first talks are much more fact filled – the second talks are much more ranty, riffy, and sometimes are lost completely in a flood of interconnected but ultimately non-cohesive thoughts. I try and give the first one whenever possible.

In some cases, I know the subject so well, am pulling directly from memory, that I can construct what I am saying on the spot from memory, and I think this contributes to a much more flowing and organic speech, one that feels like you’re being conversationally told a story. Obviously, this is not for everyone – if your talk is about this new exploit or the construction of an item, you want all the little points in a row and to bring them to the audience exactly. My talks are about ideas and people, so that’s not so important.

Improvisation is a big part of what I do. Some of my bigger laugh lines in there are made up on the spot. “I have plans for your car”, “Getting fucked for shipping costs”, “Probably not going to be flown to America”, “Bulgy McFishHat” … I heard these the same time the audience did. “Food Museum”, “Yahoo! is a clown car”, “Keep Backups”… those were thought of beforehand. So there’s no rhyme or reason to it.

I pay a lot of attention to the audience reaction, probably more than is reasonable. I’m fast thinking with regards to moving the speech in general directions, zipping to the next idea, slowing down to regard an item or concept for the sake of the group. Obviously I can do nothing for the majority of people who will be watching this on a recording, but feeling things out with the audience works for me.

So the outline, which came from the slides, is basically:

  • Introduction
  • Dedication to Tim Recher
  • Soy Sauce Story
  • The Importance of Physical Artifacts
  • The Importance, therefore, of Digital Artifacts
  • Everybody is shutting down
  • Archive Team is Formed
  • Geocities Project
  • Why Geocities has Meaning
  • Yahoo! Sucks
  • Various Site Saves: Friendster, Lulu Poetry, Google Video
  • Outside Projects: OLDUSE.NET, TELEHACK.COM
  • Inside Projects: Wikiteam, URL Team, Away from Keyboard
  • Conclusion

Throughout this talk, if I find I’m going fast or I’m getting behind (and I use an internal clock, mostly dating back to my film/mass media degree and pro experience), I will add little sidepaths, like how I go off on Google Video for a while, or skip over the “Jason Meme” thing because I want to get to some more good stuff.

What I intentionally did was flip between highly emotional, highly intense stories and moments of hilarity and lightness, tripping along giving the finger as I go. I don’t think it’s good to make the speech into a maudlin tale of lost history, but an endless drunk-sounding riff on Keeping Shit Around wouldn’t impart the seriousness ever.  So I swapped between them.

Timing myself, the Soy Sauce story goes for the first five minutes. That’s quite a risk – but in this case it paid off.

And yes, that is really some of Tim Recher’s ashes I hold up at the end. I figured that was the first time someone’s had human ashes at a DEFCON talk, and he was getting spread around the strip by his family anyway – so why not spend some time on stage first?

Presentation Style

I really, really wanted to be out on stage, and not behind a podium. Note how this makes me a pacing weirdo as I go over to hit the arrow key to do slides, but this pause also gives me time to think, which you might see if you watch me carefully. Notice how I make extra effort to use my hands, to use my body, to smile or frown. I am not afraid to turn away from the audience or turn to the screen, because I am mic’d very well. I turn to the screen for moments of incredulity. I turn to the audience for moments of anger. The sense, I hope, is of someone very passionate about their subject, very knowledgeable of what they speak, who is sharing something meaningful to them, not just a boring pitch.

I can ratchet profanity up and down as needed – I wanted this talk to show the rough and tumble way Archive Team operates and the extreme approach I can take as a participant. It means that everyone linking to the video has to add a profanity warning, or just hope for the best. I could have given this talk with no profanity, but I liked peppering it in for a DEFCON speech, because DEFCON has to walk this fine line of being a hacking convention and being a respectable dissemination of information. I wanted to keep the spice in. It’s not for everyone; I do get complaints. Fuck those guys.

I don’t get nervous in front of crowds. I am facing something like 1,000 people here, and there’s just no effect on me – it might as well be 2.  I don’t know why this is the case, but obviously I make the most of it to be able to focus on other aspects of the presentation other than fear of crowds.

For talks like this, I never respond to the audience shouting out – I will not slow the train to pick up one passenger. That’s a personal choice – if the talk required more collaboration that moment, I might be inclined to respond, but not here.

Conclusion and Future

My hope is that this talk, along with other ones I’ve given, could hold up as resume pieces for doing more public speaking. I’ve got some keynotes and presentations in the works for the next year, depending on the choice of committees and stuff out of my hands, and people advocating for me can point to this video and others and say “This is what he’s like.” And it stands as an accurate portrayal. I can’t be something I’m not, and I’m very, very happy with how things come across on this one.

So there you go. I’ll answer further questions as they come.

Keep speaking!

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The Floodwaters Rise —

So this is what my job is and that’s pretty goddamned great.

I am currently in a project to gather up scanned copies of every computer magazine or newsletter that has gone out of print. That’s what I’ve mostly been up to, and that’s where I am.

As of this writing, I have put up the following magazines and newsletters.

Computer Magazines

Computer Newsletters

This is over 2,500 issues of magazines. It’s a little harder to calculate page counts, but I believe we’re somewhere in the order of a quarter million (250,000 pages) uploaded in the last seven days. When I’m productive, I’m productive.

Let’s get things clear – I am not the person who scanned these magazines, not the person who collected them (in a few cases, I’ve been sent copies of magazines from this list or which should be on this list, but I didn’t scan them). I’m just someone who has gone out and gathered these from a huge amount of sites that have one or two magazines, or huge piles of newsletters and magazines, and I’m purely a middleman.  A very, very active middleman.

The Internet Archive backend is amazing and I have been learning a lot of ways to work with it. Specifically, I wrote a script called ingestor which can be handed PDFs of magazines and feeds them into the right place, the right collection, and with a bit of the information needed to make it slightly useful, i.e. title and date and grouping it into the right place. From there, the even more amazing deriving mechanism of Internet Archive converts the PDF into Epub, Kindle-compatible, Daisy, Djvu and whatever else it thinks it’s capable of. It also provides a kick-ass online reader so your device or browser can just start immediately reading the document. The whole thing is hardcore and intense and when I hand off the PDF of a magazine issue, I truly feel that issue is saved, preserved, and relevant.

But the work isn’t done. Here’s what I hope gets done, what I think is left to do.

When a magazine issue is up, say, this issue of Your Commodore magazine, you only have a small amount of obvious information that a script could yank in: Title, Issue Number, Month, Date. What should be up there is at least a copy of the table of contents in the description, which will help searchers greatly. What would be a dream would be a set of metadata pairs like the UPC code, the editor’s name, the page count, and the rest. I have little hope that we’ll get the dream, but the stuff that should get up there will ideally become the province of interested parties.

Besides the scanning that the army of anonymous or not-so-anonymous groups are doing, I’d like to see the descriptions and table of contents get swapped back and forth between us – archive.org having a copy, the scanning or hosting site having a copy.  If you look at some of the magazines, such as Compute! Magazine, you can see indexes and descriptions are already in. That’s because work was done on another site – I’ve given that site, atarimagazines.com, credit for doing so. I believe intensely in giving credit for it, and making those indexes generally available. I hope people consider adopting a shorter-run magazine, and doing all the describing – the cool part is you can read up on this magazine and learn everything about it, reading every issue and getting steeped in the history. But we’ll see how this all pans out.

The work continues. My intention here is to no less than utterly change the state of access to this vital aspect of computer history, this collection of programs, advertisements, images, and information related to home computers. I hope the payoff is worth the effort.

Get reading!

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