Recently, I swapped a lot of my stuff to gmail.

Let’s address this immediately: What? Jason Scott switched to a “cloud” service? Well, no, I’m paying Google for this service and they’ve demonstrated excellent uptime, except when they haven’t. But I am paying them (and Flickr, and a bunch of other services) when I use them, and they all have export/backup functions, and so on. Remember, the “cloud” is whatever people want it to be, which is why it’s worthless as a term. The fact someone you’ve never heard of with a rounded PNG logo and a javascript drag-and-drop can get your respect as quickly as Google… well..

Anyway, so now a lot of addresses and mail that used to shove through a very unhappy FreeBSD box now go off into Google and get mangled up by their machinery. And among that are some of my oldest and most proliferated hostnames, like cow.net and snuh.com. You know – short and old in an era when a 4 or 3 letter domain is unfathomable as being available to mortals. But available they once were, and that was 15 years ago or thereabouts.

Google’s pretty good with spam removal, although it does occasionally encounter a false positive or a false negative, and I get a quite-manageable amount of spam in my mailbox.  Again reminding ourselves that I have 8 domains piling through here, the 10-15 pieces of spam a day are not too hairy.

What I didn’t expect, or, more accurately, didn’t know I’d have to deal with are the chain letters.

Maybe I’ve been lucky, or, more likely, rather strict with people who mail me – send me crap that you didn’t write that you’re forwarding along because the thing you’re forwarding told you to forward it, and I am going to not treat you well, and respond to everyone on the forward list with a link that explains the forwarded material is bullshit. I totally ruin the party – facts are what I’m into, facts are what you get, and that makes it not as fun for you if you’re forwarding along an “amazing” or “incredible” story that is, fundamentally both too good to be true and describing completely impossible history. Most family and friends got the message, so I get very little of these now.

Well, until now.

Now all these mistyped, misphrased and perhaps intentional misdirections into my various domains are going through the Goog’s spam system, determining that the chain letters are in fact written by human beings, and giving them to me. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many “PLEASE FORWARD” and “YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS” messages come through. I’ve read a bunch, idly, between other work.

Can I simply say I had forgotten how much ignorant, racist, poorly-researched, badly-written, intellectually dishonest and all-around craptastic mail makes the rounds?

I mean, come on, people. I’m trying to imagine someone whose viciously underpowered, 640×480 resolution, slow-loading e-mail client has all this toxic crap spill into their mailbox, each one a comet of shame trailing the piles of gullible huckleberries it has convinced to pass itself along, and I wonder how you could possibly think you’re getting anything informative, or accurate.  But I guess people do; maybe they’re not otherwise occupied with the goings-on of a life spent online and have time to honestly be “informed” of some biblical meaning in a recently posted CNN interview, or to be shown a picture of a rock and told a set of circumstances that never happened formed the rock and scientists are “stumped”. Or they’re desperately in need of a terrible poem involving Jesus, trucks, killing or otherwise injuring various racial groups. Or being given a 4-5 line “fact” that has been forwarded (by my count) over one hundred times, and apparently nobody noticed that it’s a mildly-burnished paragraph from a comedy routine from HBO from 1987.

This is not exactly groundbreaking insight I’m passing along here, but I guess I’d just make a note of it, because I hadn’t had to swim upstream through all this mentally-damaging garbage in a while. I can’t imagine what it must do to world outlook and informativeness to have all this constitute your “getting the real story” quota for a given day/week. For the record, you’re not getting the real story or the underground truth from this bile – you’re just a memetic dumping ground, picked clean as if by a herd of bison and being left covered in their droppings as they move on down the field.

Oh, and let me save you some time:

• If a political/news posting contains the term “antichrist”, it’s probably not really that journalistically sound.
• Yes, those are really cute fucking kittens.
• If the signature line is a pile of biblical citations, don’t file the letter under “science facts”.
• If the “information XXX doesn’t want you to see” indicates that it appeared on nationwide media and spends 5 paragraphs explaining how the person saying the information XXX doesn’t want you to see is an impeccable source, maybe you should go that extra logical step, buckeye, and consider how information XXX doesn’t want you to see got on national media. Stick with it. You’ll work it out. I have faith in you.
• Don’t forward. Trust me.

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Oh, it has been an eventful month.

Sorry for the weblog getting short shrift, but I think it’s a good situation that daily life needs trump weblogging duties. That’s always been my policy, and ideally I can write essays (I try to avoid using this to write small, dashed-off half-thoughts) and still do other things I need to do. But when that’s not the case, this website goes dormant, leaving only strange screeds about archiving websites, goatse-ing myspace, and fucking incomprehensible technology promises.

But just to get back on track. It’s now Labor Day Weekend, and I’ve been enjoying a proper vacation for a few days, seeing a lot of museums, hanging with friends, checking stuff out, taking care of myself. Unfortunately, a (very) slight pall is set on the festivities.

Last Wednesday I was called into a meeting in which it was explained that, after about 12 years with a company (in which I took a year to work at a start-up, breaking up my run into a 3-year and 9-year segment pair), I was being let go.

The rulebook when you’re letting an employee go is that, short of them being violent, you kind of let them go do what they want to do. I assume some cry, some plead/beg, some stutter and fall into silence. It all depends.

Me, I twittered about it. And I mean, literally whipped out the blackberry while being given The Speech and just let people know. It seemed the thing to do.

Anyway, this sets into motion a whole range of things that are going on. Among them, is my intention to move back to my home state, NY, for eventual moving to New York City, a place I have grown rather fond of and will enjoy being a part of. I just happen to know one of the ways to end up face down in a gutter is to zoom right into NYC or LA with a suitcase and pocket of dreams, so I’ll be staying in an intermediate place, a family-owned compound, before a final move down there. Not sure of the timetable for any of this.

This is the first weekend I’ve been unemployed since 1995.  It’s hard for me to be really unhappy about any of this because 1. I’ve had a very good run considering the late 20th-century/early 21st century trends in employment.  Nearly a decade and a half of job security? Can I complain? No. and 2. The job was no longer what I really wanted to be doing as my primary time consumptor. This was a job that would not take the slightest amount of pleasure in my work in computer history, and even made some unpleasant overtures regarding my silly twittering cat.  How unlikely I would be to miss such an experience.

When I started with that company, there were roughly 225 people working for it. Through two buyouts and over a dozen name changes, I was one of three people remaining – I certainly can’t feel like I was not given a good run compared to the others. And yes, I know you’re asking what company and I won’t discuss what company – part of the rules. I was a computer administrator who for a time could be depended on to be crawling under the floor running wiring or installing cards into a Sun Server or blade system as I could be fixing disk errors, optimizing kernels or coding shell scripts to take the load off. I was proud of what I did and I did many good things. But part of the deal was no details.

I’m kind of sick of that, of the whole business of computer administrating. It was nice when I helped people and made things better but not fun to be blamed for simple execution of the laws of physics or to be made a scapegoat for horrendous planning and contingency evaluation. But more than that, it wasn’t where my heart is.

I mean, as it is probably noticable through my various projects and endeavors the general public has witnessed, my love is computer history, documentary filmmaking, creative work and public speaking and all sorts of fun stuff. Sure, a steady paycheck is nice, but is it that nice, when, as my stay in a hospital revealed, a thick layer of muscle had built up around my heart and my blood pressure was in deadly ranges? The doctor there said, simply “whatever you are doing, you should stop”. And here, it’s stopped. Dead.

What now? Well, I have a documentary to finish. Maybe I can make some money out of that project, enough to not immediately look for another job. Maybe live a little more frugally, try to piece together income from something I want to do and combine them into a living wage, enabling me to do what you’ve seen me up to before, but even more so.  Maybe.

What I do know is that right now, I answer to nobody. Nobody can make a few phone calls and get me in trouble at work. There’s no work to get me in trouble with – except, I guess, calling me, but I think I’m pretty awesome and your calls won’t get me to fire myself.

I’ve had a few things on the back burner. Time to turn them up to high and make them boil over. Time to finish up a lot of work and get going.

And, never let it be said I won’t consider this – maybe it’d be nice to get a job with someone, somewhere, some group that would be proud and not ashamed to have me on the team, whose logo I’d put in my weblog because they’d want people to know I was working there, doing what I do for them. If you’re somebody, god help you, who has said “now, all we need is Jason Scott” as part of your meetings and con calls, well, get cracking, fucker, because here I am.

And here we are.

Oh, it is going to get very, very exciting, indeed.

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As one might spend a lot of time making a collection as good and complete as it can be, I’ve decided to take one of mine apart. But I thought there might be some education or smirking memories as to how this collection occurred in the first place, so let’s just cover that a bit.

For a couple years, I collected energy drink cans.

Energy Drink Cans, as I define them, look like this:

The cans are all a little more than 8 fluid ounces in capacity.  They all indicate they’re full of special stuff that will make you work harder or smarter (or, later on, claim they’re more healthy or maybe just soda). And they’re all pretty expensive, usually ranging from $2 to $5 a can.

I have about 200.

I won’t mince words. These things usually taste pretty awful, like the bombs have dropped and someone is asking the Bev-O-Tron to compose whatever those smiling people in archived commercials were drinking, but BOT only had motor oil and recently dead people to work with. I would usually open one up, swish a mouthful, and either swallow it quickly or spit it into the sink. Drinking all of them was usually not on the agenda.

What has fascinated me about these things is they’re rife with charlatans, and a beverage fad that I am sure will be on its last legs within a decade. I can’t imagine us continuing to buy these things in 10 years, when all the ill health effects come out or someone dies from drinking six thousand of them one weekend.  They often have amazing bright colors, photoshop gone wrong in a big way, and claims that would make a zombie Barnum spit out his snake oil and start lawsuits.

Oh, and they love stealing stuff. Check out this suspiciously-like-a-browser-logo label:

(Sorry it’s so dark – it’s just a very dark logo to begin with.)

All sorts of chicanery belies itself throughout my hundreds of cans. Labels that look like a desert, like a cartoon, like ammunition, like fireworks. They all laud having vitamins or Taurine or god-knows-what terms among them. You are expected to somehow come off stronger and healthier for downing these poison capsules. And the fact there are hundreds indicates many believe so.

There are likely historical lines further behind, but for me the story starts with Red Bull. I was working at Psygnosis in 1995 and we had the first betas of Wipeout stop by the office, still being worked on and with terribly dodgy graphics generation (flashes shot up and down the track from faces not lining up). But the game was obviously out to kick some ass, and the fact that you could go so fast and come to a screeching halt by your own lack of skill was kind of refreshing. A lot of driving games, and I mean a lot, are kind of like playing a big fat game of shuffleboard, where you bounce harmlessly down the track just edging people in and out as the AI tries to keep it all ‘fun’. In Wipeout, failure to execute meant you were left behind and would never catch up.

On the billboards above the track were ads for “Red Bull”. I remember this distinctly, thinking “Oh, what a shame they had to make up a drink instead of some actual drink.” I had never heard of Red Bull. At all. It was completely foreign to me.  According to this site, the feeling was accurate – Red Bull wouldn’t make an appearance in the US until 1997.

But Red Bull changed everything. Here was this crazy drink, full of caffiene and who knows what else, supposedly able to give you energy. And it was in this very uniquely shaped can for a soda. And it was fucking expensive. Super expensive. At a time when soda was on a downward price trend ($0.99 for a 2 liter bottle of the usual crap) they were jacking it up, way up, into the multiple dollar range. For less soda! Wow!

Here’s the thing, though.  People paid for it! Way back when, there was this awesome urban myth that Red Bull contained Bull Semen (where “Taurine” supposedly came from) or some variation of Unexpected Bull Portion. Red Bull did very little to dismiss this myth. It grew and became a club mix drink. It took off.

So naturally, six billion later companies have gone “Hmmm. Charge a lot. Make wild claims. Make the cans small. Got it.”

And that’s where my collection comes in.  It’s the form factor that really makes me enjoy them – these small cans with expensive costs and crazy names. I recall enjoying, for example, “Pimp Juice” in Salt Lake City in 2004. “Cocaine” energy drink, shut down and then returned to market. And, of course, “Firedog” energy drink, named after the tech support desk at Circuit City. That’s right, energy drinks to commemorate tech support.

So I’ve been collecting this stuff for years. But in the present day, the goal is to focus on what makes sense to have, and to archive things properly, and archiving cans is crazy. So I’m going to be taking photos of these things, then donating some to the energy drink museum, and whatever else will go into the great metal beyond.

I will be sad to see them go, but you have to make the right choices. I archive computer history. There’s a lot of computer history, and some of it has been hard to find, and get online. Energy Drink Cans are their own thing. I think that others could do a better job and focus on that. I should be putting my efforts where they belong. And somehow, this doesn’t seem to have been it.

Now, if you excuse me, I think I’ll pound a few tiny expensive cans back and get back to work.

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