ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

The Next Documentary —

I think the BBS Documentary surprised a lot of people by being so huge and coming out of nowhere. Just like some of my websites, that was definitely the intention – go from zero to 100mph and a massive collection, so that people who didn’t know they wanted something got it in spades. It has been very popular and gotten a lot of attention, both as a product and a documentary. I even had to do another re-order of the DVDs to be able to keep selling them – that means I’ve sold at least 4300 copies.

Not a week goes by, to this day, that I don’t get some communication about that series and what it means to people, or what memories it brought back – you name it.  It has been a wild success.

Deciding what I wanted to do next was slightly more difficult, including whether I wanted to do another one at all. Shooting the BBS Documentary as long as I did and with so much work had taken a lot out of me and my life. But the joy of bringing that project to fruition won me over to doing it again, except with a smaller focus. So after much thought, I went after text adventures and interactive fiction. GET LAMP was the result.

So, there were two specific reasons I went after interactive fiction as the subject: I felt a reasonable bond and knowledge of that culture/world, and it was obvious that no such documentary was going to ever appear again, at least within the reasonable lifetimes of the main participants.

A question that never became a factor was how difficult it might be to take the text adventure story and experience and put it online – I knew it would be difficult, and that the resulting work would appeal to a specific audience, and so on. I knew this going in, and when the film was done, this is what happened… some people really loved it, some people were a little confused, and some people liked one thing or set of things more than another.  But the fact remained – my audience had a choice of what to pick from, where before there was nothing at all.

So, I did right by the subject – it helped rejuvenate a genre to a small amount, got “the story” down, and we got to tell a whole host of really awesome folks how awesome they are. It will never be a mainstream documentary, and it was never meant to be, and I was happy to spend the years on it.

Now, what’s next.

Well, I’ve got a couple ideas, and shortly I’ll be announcing them, with trailers and a website and all the rest.

One will be the “classic” Jason Scott documentary type that people seem to think I’ll do, that is, a subject explored so hugely that it takes up multiple storage units and which has tons of footage and interviews and the rest. And perhaps the last big (or only) documentary on the subject.

The other will be a video podcast series. But more specifically, it will be a series of episodes, maybe half an hour apiece, covering a piece of the main subject and being released frequently, maybe every few months or even quicker, so that people don’t have to wait until whatever, 2013 or 2014, to see more work from me. Eventually there would be a deluxe product at the end of it, although by that time, actually in both cases, we’re possibly talking USB stick inside a custom case. I suspect digital download sales to have settled by then as well.

To do this, I will be putting up a kickstarter, asking for a significant chunk of change. Very significant.

If the kickstarter doesn’t make it, I won’t make the films. I will, in fact, stop making films – I can’t afford to make them on my own anymore.

But if it makes it, then that is what I will do for the forseable future.

It’s going to be interesting to see where it goes.

5 Comments

Destroying the History to Save It —

Hi Jason,

I have a question for you, I’m hoping you can help me decide what to do.

I have a lot of vintage computer magazines and books. Not Information Cube level “lots”, but still, boxes and boxes of them.  A lot of this stuff is destined for AtariMagazines.com and AtariArchives.org. Some of it, I don’t have permission to post but it’s still interesting and good stuff, and maybe I’ll have permission one day.

2.5 years ago I moved all this stuff from my house to my new office. I unpacked some of it, never unpacked a lot of it. Now, my family and are planning to move from northern California to Portland, Oregon this summer. Which means moving all of these boxes of magazines once again.

Which brings me to my question. I have a great duplex scanner. Two actually. Should I just cut the bindings off these magazines and digitize them all? Should I just decide that the content is the important part, and not fetishize the objects themselves? Right now, they’re hard to access, the information is impossible to search, etc. Or is it better to have the actual *thing*?

If you could digitize everything in the info cube, but destroy the originals in the process, would you?

And what about particularly rare mags — early issues that are hard to find, expensive on ebay?

My feeling is that for the stuff that isn’t extremely rare, I should just digitize it, bringing it one step closer to OCR and getting it online. . . or at least easily searchable on a hard drive. Then toss the original paper and move on. But I would like a sanity check from you on this.

One related thing that may interest you. I feel that OCRing these magazines is critical – something I have been doing for years at AtariMagazines.com and AtariArchives.org. But as I’m sure you know, OCR alone is not that great, you need human proofreaders to clean up the text if it’s going to be online. So I am creating a tool that will OCR pages, then send the OCRd text and images of the corresponding pages to Amazon Mechanical Turk, to have actual human people proofread and correct the text. It will allow me to get a LOT of high-quality, human-proofread OCR quickly. Basically it will be like Project Gutenberg’s  Distributed Proofreaders project, but it could be used with any text, not just PD text. (In addition to me using it for old computer magazines, it will be a web-based service that businesses could use.) Is that tool something that would help you in your preservation efforts?

Thanks for your thoughts on this stuff,

Kevin

Hey there, Kevin. Thanks for thinking of me.  Sorry it took so long to respond to this.

I am sorry that this strange, weird little world of computer and technological history has to experience the same issue as so many other realms do – that of doing terrible things in the name of good.  I shouldn’t be surprised this is the case. But one could always hope that just as computers seem to be the tool to end all tools, the machine that makes machines that make even better machines, there might have been a chance it wouldn’t fall prey to the same Faustian bargains extant in a thousand other situations. But there we have it.

In the case of documents and materials that are perfect bound, that is, attached by adhesive like so:


Well, with current scanning technology the best way to absolutely get the most effective scan/snapshot of the material is to destroy the binding. Just break that poor thing apart, scan it flat in a nice scanner, and then end up with a broken, used, impossible-to-keep pile of paper.

Now, don’t get me wrong – there’s been an enormous amount of effort applied out there to deal with the binding-being-broken issue. For example, some scanners of particularly rare books take a head-on photo of a flat book page and then use all sorts of mathematical trickery to calculate the curvature of the pages from the binding to flatten them out. Google does it when they scan books for their massive blorb of content. A lot of really smart people are working on that problem, and if you’ve never heard of Unpaper before now… well, you’re welcome.

But at the end of the day, in the currency of the present, the absolute best material to have would be a series of paper sheets and scan them flat, at a nice and high resolution.  And if you have something that you can get into that form, the resulting scans will be much better – but again, you’ll have destroyed the source material in the process. Wrecked it.

This is a huge internal debate for me. Huge. As big as it gets.

After much thought, I came up with the following rule-set for the day I destroy something to save it.

IF I have a document or paper set that requires some level of destruction to scan properly AND IF I have three copies of it AND IF there is no currently-available digital version of the document AND IF there is a call or clamor for this document set THEN AND ONLY THEN I will split the binding and scan at a very high resolution and additionally apply OCR and other modern-day miracles to the resulting document so that the resulting item is, if not greater than the original, more useful to the world.

This is, as you might imagine, an impossibly high standard. So high, I haven’t had anything pass it yet.

I’ve certainly embarked on large scanning projects before – for a year I scanned over 7000 pages of documents from Steve Meretzky’s collection, a scanning project that saved a lot of time for the archive that eventually took those documents over.  I also scanned these items at an insane rate,  800 dpi, meaning that you could see this level of detail in the final images:

In his case, though, I didn’t have to worry about hurting these one-of-a-kind copies of Meretzky’s notes and papers – they were all in a binder and they could be brought out, scanned, and put back. I was lucky. And, by extension, a lot of people are lucky. (There’s still plans to put all these scans on archive.org – ideally in a few months.)

Sitting in my cube are entire collections of magazines, entire runs of all the issues that ever came out. The IF there is a call or clamor part of the above statement usually kicks in first and I haven’t scanned them in. For example, if you want an entire run of a newsletter dedicated to the typesetting software TeX; well… I got a box I can show you. But it just hasn’t seemed justified to go and scan that all in, in hopes someone will find it interesting. I’ve been focusing on other things as of late.

And then every once in a while, I discover someone has embarked on a project that I would normally be doing if my ruleset had been achieved, but since they have a smaller ruleset, they got there quicker. Such it was, recently, that it turns out someone is scanning in a bunch of issues of BYTE magazine.

Here’s the thread in question.  The scanning fellow shows up regularly and points to a multi-hundred-megabyte PDF file of an issue of BYTE magazine, including a nice introduction and overview of the contents, and the resulting downloaded file is easy to read, browse, and enjoy. It is very, very hard to look this gift horse in the mouth and find faults – I mean, this guy is scanning hundreds of pages, very quickly, and providing them for free. But here we go, finding cavities anyway…

Somewhere in the middle of the love fest that is this thread, someone points out that one of the pages is scanned improperly in the PDF, and a page is missing. The response from the scanning gentleman, frankly, chills me to the bone:

“I will fish the magazine out of the garbage and get those fixed.”

So after scanning these magazines, he immediately trashes them. Whoop, right into the bin. Now, the PDFs are great, but they’re not exactly excellent. The resolution is sub-par (so you can’t easily read many of the ads or look at details) and any printing or close-up viewing of the page is blurry indeed. But that’s it, they’re in the trash and gone.

Somewhere along the line, I convinced myself of this way of thinking: Well, instead of being a guy who owns these and throws them out, here’s a guy who scans them and puts them online, and then throws them out. This is the same internal gymnastics that makes it possible for me to vaguely respect all those boring-ass condo villages in the suburbs, because at the very least putting all those people in tightly-packed shitboxes sure beats that same amount of people taking up a hundred times the space with houses sporting massive useless lawns. The upside, you see.

But this falls apart quickly when one investigates what happens next: people begin sending the scanner/destructor their own copies of BYTE. Now he’s not just destroying his collection, he’s unwittingly convinced other people to give up their collections to the cause, destroying even more copies along the way, copies that can never be scanned at a better resolution, or given a chance to be cleaned up from said higher resolutions before being turned into a standards compliant and quick-as-lightning PDF. (With an archive of the original TIFFs around, as well.)

I have to stress – there’s no evil at work here.  Scanner-destroyer is donating a lot of time for this project.  People are benefiting from this effort, as they can read issues of BYTE that they never read or heard of when they were younger. BYTE is a world-class magazine in the 1970s and 1980s – as good as it gets in a technical realm. It’s a pleasure to read and hours of thoughtfulness afterwards. It’s good. It’s worth saving.

But this situation, this striking-the-balance problem of destruction versus saving, of trash and triumph – it’s one I haven’t really had to address yet, and I know that that day will come, and with it will be some very sad, very intense feelings as I take a razor blade to something fate and respect entrusted to my care.

I will not enjoy that day at all.

17 Comments

Tim —

When I closed down the first incarnation of my BBS and went to college, I got contacted by a young BBS user who’d enjoyed my board when it was still up, and asked if he could continue it. He did, and The Works BBS lived on for another solid decade before being dormant for the time being. (Time being, that is, for yet another decade.) This second incarnation, a second chance, introduced me to an entire social group of young hacker and computer-using types, many years younger than me, who all did their own little versions of what I’d done in my teens, except with slightly faster hardware and a propensity to drive cars, which I myself didn’t do until my late twenties.

It was a striking miasma, all these kids, and through the BBS meets and the hanging out and the online chatter, I lost track of a lot of them. I don’t mean in years hence – I mean at the time. I could claim part of it was that I was attending college, after all, but it was also just a feeling of being the old guy and concentrating more on conversations and events more than names and faces. But, of course, some stood out. Personalities, events, particularly biting commentary or drama – a few got through my fog.

One of these was Tim, and he did it in a pretty spectacular fashion.

That’s Tim on the left there, with the Michael Binkley hairdo and the smile.

Like I said, he’d been around in the “scene” that I was at best a tangential old guy in, and he’d even been a co-sysop on the BBS (I was an honorary sysop) and had written his share of messages, under the name “Redline”. Or “Netrunner”. He used both at various times.

One day, I was informed that Tim had been in a car accident. A really bad car accident, one of those you’re not supposed to walk away from. He’d been in the crash with his girlfriend at the time (who’s the lady on the right side of the above photo). It was all supposed to be pretty terrible, and after all he was a co-sysop, so in a very rare event, I went to the hospital. At the time I avoided hospitals to the best of my ability, and my avoidance abilities had been pretty good – I’d probably walked into a hospital as a patient less than a half-dozen times and I’d basically never really visited anyone in them. But this one seemed worth the time.

What I remember, besides how uncomfortable I was in the hospital, is that Tim, in his bed, was friendly and cheerful, and had the most amazing fucking scar. We’re talking just a massive gash from ear to jaw, one of those scars you usually have to call Rick Baker in to whip up.

Naturally, I eschewed any sense of propriety and respect and demanded to know everything about it. Had it cut off some nerves? (It had, one of his eyebrows couldn’t lift anymore) Did they think they’d be able to work with it? (Nope, it was going to be permanent.) I just grilled the poor guy silly about it, and when his girlfriend came in with a head gash that was also quite amazing, I asked about that too.

He healed up and she healed up, and except for the different large scar they each had, they basically walked away from this terrible accident with no after-effects – truly, a second chance at life.

Every time I ever saw Tim again, I’d ask about the scar, and over time it healed over, was quite visible, but still, in my opinion, awesome looking. It was a scar that said “don’t fuck with me; I killed and ate your worst nightmare last week”. Too bad it was attached to such a fun and friendly guy; it totally ruined the effect.

I’d known Tim since his teens, and as time went on and I became Mr. Historian Guy and spoke at DEFCON and went to other events, I’d see him here and there. I was, again, my usual rude and light-patter self and when he introduced me to his new lady who became his new wife, I apparently decided that since we were in Las Vegas, she needed to learn how Roulette was played, and I took her off and taught her over the course of several hundred bucks. Which we lost. The perfect lesson.

So that’s the way it was, Tim being one of the people I’d remember when I saw him, but not hanging out or anything like that. Just doing our things, separately but running in some of the same circles.

The news came, as it contemporarily does, through facebook. Murmurings in messages, posts here and there, and then some twittering, and all of it said the same thing: Tim had died.

Heart attack. 36.

That’s not a very good combination of phrases to put together. He’d just gone, poof, no warning.

He left behind a wife and daughter, and a lot of memories.

At his wake, I decided he’d always known of me as the bombastic paternal figure of the social group, who jumped in, did wildly inappropriate things, and then went on, leaving stories and wide eyes in my wake. So before I went in to see him, I checked into his funeral home on Foursquare. It seemed the right thing to do.

Tim was there, as was his family and friends and many of those same kids I’d known from the BBS days, the ones with the fog about my memories and who all had grown up themselves, to their own states of maturity and being. Tim had two things in his casket that I recall: the keys to his Mustang (he’d apparently loved that thing more than a person reasonably should) and a big ol’ pair of bunny slippers. Style.

I idly checked, seeing if some well-meaning individual had made some effort to hide Tim’s scar. They hadn’t. Awesome. That was an awesome scar. But it was on an even more awesome guy. Redline, Netrunner, Tim.

Hackers don’t die, they just get their docs dropped.

His name was Tim Recher, and he was my friend.

7 Comments

Where is Dor Sageth? —

A fan wrote the following letter, which I’m including in its entirety. They’re right, this game appears to have completely disappeared and can’t be found. But maybe some kind souls can help. As I and others add more and more information, perhaps more knowledge about the game can arrive – but I’m pretty sure the chances of us playing the actual game again are gone.

Dear Jason,

Thank you for your interesting site.

I cannot find the text game Dor Sageth, nor its source code anywhere on today’s Internet. I would love to be able to play it again.

YOU ARE STANDING IN A…. (PART OF A SPACESHIP) …

I played it when I was logged on to GEnie Basic Services. GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service created by a General Electric business – that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users.

It was an off-shoot of the Colossal Cave adventure game.

Dor Sageth bits of information:

marmot58
October 2, 2010 4:40am
What about Dor Sageth? It was a text adventure game that took place aboard an abandoned alien space ship. It was hosted on GEnie, which was later acquired by Compuserve I think.

Slashdot | Quantum Link Reverse Engineered
Sep 19, 2005 …  I think it was called “Dor Sageth”. It was a huge inter-galactic spaceship and the goal was to get to the command room and take control. Love that game! Wonder if anyone else recalls it.

slashdot.org/articles/05/09/19/2321236.shtml

Are computer games your pleasure?CompuServe has a few:I Blackjack (GAM-60)0 Dor Sageth (GAM-527)I Football (GAM-27)0 Golf (GAM-21)I Hangman (GAM-Z3)O Lunar Lander (GAM-24)0 Megawars (MEGA1 through MEGA3)0 New Adventure (GAM-50)For a list of games, go gam-1

Entertainment/Games:

Black Dragon… descend through the dungeon and slay the black dragon
Castle Quest… dungeon adventure
Original Adventure… classic text adventure game
Adventure 550… advanced version of adventure
Dor Sageth… dungeon adventure
Banner Maker… create your own text banners (for printout)
Show Biz Quiz… test your knowledge
Rainbo… online reviews of books, movies
Cineman… movie reviews
Hollywood Hotline… news from tinseltown
Soap Opera Summaries… keep up with the soaps
Show Biz Bulletin Board… discussions on TV and movies
Music Bulletin Board… talk about records
TeleJoke Bulletin Board… the latest humor

I can’t remember now whether it was Quantum Link or The Source (anyone remember them?) that had a great game that I spent way too many hours playing. I think it was called “Dor Sageth”. It was a huge inter-galactic spaceship and the goal was to get to the command room and take control. Love that game! Wonder if anyone else recalls it.

2 Comments

The BBS Documentary Reborn —

Late last year I realized a very awesome problem.

It turned out that the BBS Documentary, my little flick from 2005, was in real danger of running out of copies. Way back when, I ended up having to decide how many copies were going to be printed up, I chose the number of 4,500, figuring I’d shoot for the moon. Sales were brisk at first and then naturally slowed down, but then they stayed steady.

With the introduction of GET LAMP, I created something called the “Jason Scott Filmography Doublepack“, where you could order both BBS and GET LAMP as a dual-pack. This drove sales back up to some good levels, but it also meant the remaining stock was running on fumes, and just before the end of 2010, I had completely sold out of copies. (There’s a single box of 20 I have kept in reserve, for collecting and other such reasons.)

So then the problem became paying for another run of copies – my money has become very tight and I can’t drop cash like I used to.

Luckily, an anonymous fan has paid for the production run (and gets back their investment, plus interest, soon) and a whole new set of 1000 copies were printed up for me.

BBS Documentary Pile BBS Documentary Pile Example BBS Doc Forklifting BBS Docs

Obviously, it’s good to have a forklift handy.

The main difference between the old and new copies of BBS Documentary is the disc art, which is very slightly different, says the same things, but allows one to know if the documentary in question is part of the initial run or a later one. This matters to some people. Some.

I’d like to thank the anonymous lender, the people at Bullseye Disc for doing another great production run of this needlessly complicated packaging, and you, all the thousands who have bought copies of this thing over the past few years.

Now buy more! We got plenty!

1 Comment

The RSS Problem —

So, I have a pretty major problem with the feed.

It doesn’t update in a lot of clients. It updates in others. But my readership is wondering if I died.

I’m working hard to figure out what’s going on, but it takes time – if previous situations are any indication, it’s some sort of ass-kicking parsing error, which causes certain feedreaders to stop looking any further. That might mean if I post a LOT of stuff, it will scroll off the bottom, but then people miss certain articles.

Nightmare, basically. But I wanted people to know I was working on it. Here’s hoping, advice always welcome.

UPDATE: Complicated installed spamware, probably from a bad plugin. Fixed, or at least at bay for now.

Glad to see people showing up, going “oh god, you didn’t die”. I guess “Penalty Box” is not the best entry to have stopped at.

So what this malware was doing was sitting on the output for the ASCII blog, and then every time something Google or Bing-Esque went by, it would switch to offering spam. Google was going “Well, fuck this!” and ignoring it, therefore not updating the site, therefore not adding to search, and so on. Ugly, ugly stuff. I still need to clean out some stuff but now I know how it likely happened. I’ll be doing some work to harden it up. Welcome back, readers.

13 Comments

Information Cube Packing —

So how’s that information cube coming, anyway?

infocube 001

Well, structurally, that cube’s doing pretty darn well. It’s been solid, watertight, continually huge, and quietly has done its job since I got it in early 2010. It has also been packed up pretty hard, and some items had drifted or gone into the house, where they were making the house look pretty much un-stylish.

So I spent a few hours in there, and made some space:

infocube 007

The scale of that is very difficult to discern.  Here’s a photo standing in front of those yellow/black boxes and aimed back out the door:

infocube 005

This was previously completely full. I made some proper adjustments, modified a few stacks, and found all this space. Unfortunately, I’m in the process of completely filling it up again. But the good news is that the house will look nothing like these photos.

I just moved the remainder of the GET LAMP boxes in. They came in on two pallets in August, but look how many are basically left:

infocube 009

That’s still about a thousand, but don’t panic. Unless panic makes you impulsively buy dozens of copies, at which point, panic. But I suspect this will hold me into some point this year, maybe as early as April, but probably as late as September. Let’s see what life ends up throwing in terms of purchases.

With the packing up comes the closing for most purposes of the cube for the winter. It’s too cold to get things done, and I need to sort this thing, and I’m not going to do that in the snow. But I do have a plan.

Right now, that box is a mish-mash of personal items, computer history items, and items that I kept because I was just trying to transport a lot of materials in a very short period of time and nobody was going to happily sit around while I play SortBoy for hours on end. So the cube is not just inefficient right now, it’s hard to navigate and probably contains stuff that doesn’t even need to exist anymore. That’ll change when it starts to get warm again.

At that point, I will arrange a day, scoop up volunteers (the cube is in Dutchess County, NY) and we will be doing a very comprehensive re-jiggering, with the whole laid-out-tarps + installation-of-shelves + reboxing process, which one can hope will take less than a day, especially with enough hands.

For now, though, it’s just a heck of a lot of stuff. But it’s safe and dry and can wait a few months. I can live with that.

1 Comment

Geocities Torrent Update —

Hey, remember that Geocities torrenting thing?

OK, so right now no person outside of myself has the full copy of the Geocities torrent actually torrenting. Let me explain why and show the roadmap to fixing that.

Essentially, the problem is that my internet connection isn’t what it used to be – I used to have some pretty sweet 20/20 FiOS (which I used constantly) and right now the main connection is a hysterically crappy cable modem. Bear in mind that a lot of my downloads now go to servers already out there in the wide world, on good connections – but the personal connection is rather undependable and slow.

I’ve been direct uploading to a non-publicized location so that my seeds can use that data. but so far we’re only halfway done. So the torrent is halfway done. I’ve had to watch an awful lot of people come up with completely crazy conspiracy theories as to why the seed is only halfway there, and that’s the reason – there’s only currently half to pull from.

In two cases, people mailed me hard drives, I put a full copy on there, sent them back… and guess what. No seed showing up on the torrent. Oh well. More people are sending me drives, so if nothing else, be aware this copy is in more than one place already and will be in even more places shortly.

I’ve been looking for a place with a huge upstream to maybe bring a laptop with USB drive to to flush things out, but that hasn’t been successful quite yet. If you’re in the NYC area, have an insane upstream pipe, and feel like having a houseguest for a few hours, let me know.

But the upshot is, don’t worry – I plan to have all of the geocities torrent passing around very soon in 2011. It’s all working.

And where was everyone worrying about their geocities warez in 2009, anyway?

More archive team fun is happening shortly – I’ll keep you posted.

22 Comments

A Pair of Shoes —

Just a quick comparison between a pair of shoes I liked and bought about a year and a half ago, and the exact same brand and size of shoes bought new.

A Pair of Shoes

I am really tough on shoes.

A Pair of Shoes

I walk with a strange gait, pushing outwards on both sides as I walk, and this destroys pretty much every brand of shoe I ever buy. I used to buy ¡craptastico! brand shoes because why drop real cash for something you’re going to destroy, without fail, in months? As it turned out, slightly more expensive shoes last slightly longer, and I got a little tired of wearing shoes that belonged paired up with a track suit and 3-liter bottle of soda, so I got to appreciate style. The brand of these shoes is on the photos, I won’t promote them for search engines.

A Pair of Shoes

So you’ll note the blown out heel, worn down on one side completely, and how the back of the shoes blew out some time ago. I don’t do that much walking, but like I said, I walk with such destructive force, partially because of poor posture and a lot because I have joint problems, the thing just gets destroyed.

A Pair of Shoes

I don’t have any clever wrap-up thought, just figured I’d share the comparison because it’s rare I have the previous and the current shoe be the same item.

A Pair of Shoes

7 Comments