A Simple Survey — September 11, 2009

I don’t like doing short, one-off entries, but the nature of a survey is you don’t pollute it with too much verbiage, lest you end up pushing people in weird directions.

That said, I’d like to invite people who think they might buy my next documentary to take a survey over on the GET LAMP site. It’s 4 questions. Should take you milliseconds. It would help me a lot, because it’s one thing to “decide” how things will go, but when you’re selling stuff, you want people to be happy with what they’re being offered. This survey will help me recalibrate things.

Here’s the survey. Thanks.

1 Comment

Reformatting The Lamp — September 10, 2009

I get a lot of ideas. Some of them are not very good, like I bet I can drive without completely scraping all the snow off this windshield, or the classic I probably don’t have to wait a couple minutes before pulling this out of the microwave.

Other ones are pretty good, like hey, let’s bring a VAX and a PDP-11 to a hacker conference, or it appears there hasn’t been a documentary on bulletin board systems so maybe I should do one.

And then there’s the really good ones, the ones that fall into my lap or come to me and they burn with such passion that I spend more time contemplating and planning their repurcussions than coming up with the idea in the first place. And one of those hit this morning thanks to a poster on this thread.

The idea is this:

What if I released GET LAMP on a USB Stick?

Here’s the thinking.

First of all, there’s no way I’m using Blu-Ray, and Blu-Ray is the defacto standard for “it goes on a plastic disk thing and you shove it into a machine” for high definition. This leaves regular ol’ DVD-ROM. Regular ol’ DVD-ROM is a very mature format and I can do a lot with it, but I will end up with a SD version of the HD stuff I shot, AND it’s using a standard called MPEG-2, which is a pretty puffy little standard as far as video goes – it predates the first Playstation.

MPEG-2 currently is supplanted by MPEG-4, which can put a lot more detail into a much smaller space. There’s also the matter of the Matroska media container, which is an open-source spec that lets you shove in a bunch of subtitles, video streams, and other cool stuff into a single file.

USB sticks are now pretty ubiquitous. The USB2 standard (which is about to be supplanted by a higher-speed version) is a pretty robust little sucker, and USB flash drives have been around long enough that they’re getting pretty cheap and definitely getting accepted enough that there’s crazy customized versions of them available. Witness:

Now, granted, the per-unit costs are higher – but only if you compare them to DVD-ROMs – with Blu-Ray as it currently is (and always will be, if the current regime holds), these will be cheaper. And hold more stuff. And be cooler.

I mean, look at some of these selections.

You’d get all the footage I was intending to put on there, PLUS even MORE bonus stuff, like scanned images, photos, audio, maybe some games, and it would be even easier to make it accessible to the blind and deaf, which was on my list. 4gb or 8gb, it’d all be on one little item, and it’d work, and I’d be paying nothing to any cartel.

So, hit me up, folks. Tell me why I shouldn’t go for this, this way. Is there any downside? Any?

Oh, these ideas fire me up. I’m delighted when they happen.

45 Comments

Blu-Ray Still Blows — September 9, 2009

Some time ago I wrote an entry that got some attention about the Blu-ray format and why I refuse to release anything on it. It’d be nice to release the text adventure documentary in what Blu-Ray claims to be, but reality showed it not to be the case.

I was alerted recently to the fact that the Blu-ray fees I quoted had been modified, and were “more friendly” to independents, that is, groups for whom $5-$10k in fees are not chump change or somewhere near a couple days of catering bill. Obviously this is not everyone but it’s basically everyone I care about. Naturally, I took a look.

I am referring, here, to this document, which is an excellent overview of the current fee schedule and changes made. However, bear in mind that to truly understand what all the fees, licensing and issues are for you, you’re really going to have to hit up the AACS site and download all the licensing agreements. I am not in any way suggesting normal people do this, but to really get a handle on what it all means, you have to grab all that stuff, and trust me, any document with the words “WITNESSETH” in the contracts you have to sign is probably not something you want to waste your time on, unless you’re a lawyer or hiring one, or actually want to release stuff on Blu-ray. Then you kind of have to do it.

So here’s the high-level message relating to these new changes related to the Blu-ray fees:

FUCK BLU-RAY.

I just wanted to make it clear. The new changes, which are the “final” licensing setups (the previous terms I covered were “interim”), are just as henious and stupid as they’ve always been. The pain has been shifted around and I guess for people who are looking for any silver lining in a fart you can convince yourself that the new terms are more “independent friendly”. But the fact is they’re more independent friendly just as not setting a house on fire that you just robbed is “homeowner friendly”. A reasonable person whose tab is not being picked up by a huge, fat company with insider lines and entire legions of lawyers looking for some leathery contract to chew on still has no reason to go with Blu-ray. Steady as she goes – this thing is as open and loving as a customized cartridge that plugs into a customized system and charges you an arm and a leg to make the cartridge. Just because the “cartridge” is a disc that in ye olde days was a pretty inexpensive way to get your message out does not mean we’re anywhere near the same animal. Listen to me, people: a/v components being built now will decrease resolution on images if it “suspects” you’re doing anything “wrong” with it. Do you realize how sick that is? That we let it come to this?

I mean, check this ass-fuckery:

Analog “Sunset” provision

The final AACS License agreements also include provisions to phase out the use of analog output in Blu-ray players. It says that all Blu-ray players manufactured after December 31, 2010 must limit the analog output to SD resolution. After December 31, 2013, no device that can decrypt AACS content can have any analog outputs. The intent of this is to limit casual piracy and has no effect on how you author your Blu-ray discs.

Did you see that? And you’re fine with this? They’re fucking breaking the functionality of shit just because they can and you’re fine with this?

Anyway, back to the new terms.

As mentioned before, these fees are related to the innovation and R&D of a given format. The idea is that because a lot of research went into the items, the groups who have patents on them will get fees and payments related to the creation of the items. It’s a way to ensure that people who create stuff are then given money and credit for the years they spent working through all the hurdles of their technology. You make an amazing new nail-clipper, and then everyone who buys your nail-clipper is paying $0.05 to the nail clipper inventor. CDs and DVDs had this going on for many years, and we didn’t really care because the cost (as low as pennies a disc) were in the realm of chump change. DVDs charged more, but again, it was enough that a duplicator wouldn’t even bring it up as a cost on your side; you were just charged X for each duplicated disc, and some piece of that went to fees and to licensing and whatever.

The situation with Blu-ray is that the fees are significant enough, and the AACS bullshit is so mandatory now, that even duplicators have to let you know about it, lest you find them entirely uncompetitive or in some way ripping you off.

So let’s address the base issue here: copy protection is mandatory. That is, if you want to make a Blu-Ray disc, you have to put copy protection on it. You have to pay for the privilege of the copy protection. There is no situation where you can’t have that copy protection. It’s not even particularly good copy protection, since people are ripping Blu-Ray discs quite happily and have for significant months now. But you have to have it and you have to pay for it.

A bunch of my issues with this format rise from this set of situations, where you are being latched onto mandatory crap-ass restrictions and licensing for something you very likely don’t even fucking want. Any of the changes they’ve made to the fee structure is just a shell game after that.

Previously, you had to pay $3000 for your special key for your Blu-ray disc. You had to buy this thing and you had to use it, and if the duplicator didn’t use it they’d lose the license to duplicate discs. Now, you can choose to pay $500 a year for this special key, paying every year you are duplicating discs (up to ten years) for a total of $5000. Or, you can pay the $3000 up front. In other words, they have composed a loan-shark system around the key payment. I don’t know what part of that makes you say “wow, they’re opening up to independents”.

The rest of the changes are similar. You pay $500 for the use of a key you just paid that $500 to get. You pay per disc for the use of that key. You also have a number in there, a special arbitrary number, that defines you as an “independent”. It is all wasted money, so you can buy into a system trying to close itself off and go completely vertical and keep people who are not part of the syndicate out.

It’s heinous.

Sorry, I’m sticking with it. Fuck Blu-Ray.

27 Comments

Destruction Orders, For Example — September 8, 2009

So, in scanning thousands of pages of Infocom history, the next question is what use this all might have.

As it stands, I can give an extremely obscure example. Likely you’re going to be left with the same impression you previously had; that is, you will continue to think what I’ve been doing is a waste of time or an excellent choice. But let’s go with it anyway.

I was alerted to this weblog entry in which someone sat down with the feelies (included extras) for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, and translated the “alien language” of one of the documents.

The document in question is an alien version of the “Order for Destruction” included in the packaging as well; the joke is that the main character’s house is set to be destroyed, and then it turns out the entire Earth is set to be destroyed, and the documents are the same.

In his weblog posting, Mike Schiraldi figures out this document is a simple cryptogram, and sets about translating it. As it turns out, the cryptographic message is riddled with errors and kind of random. He does not concern himself with speculation as to why this is the case, and why phrases would be in the document like “destroyed andotherwi se transformed into nondescript heap of pulverized rubble”, broken syntax and all.

I have an advantage over Mike, having scanned Steve Meretzky’s excellent documentation related to this game (and his other Infocom works, as well). I don’t think this really needs to have Steve be bothered with asking him why things were like they were – instead, I just looked at what was scanned in and here’s my two cents.

Much heavy lifting in design, layout, and verbiage for Infocom was done by a firm called Giardini/Russell, Inc. out of Watertown, Massachusetts. In fact, let’s just make it clear – a lot of what people think of as “Infocom” is in fact Giardini/Russell. For example: The Zork logo, the names Infidel and Deadline, and, of course, the verbiage of the advertisements I previously discussed. They wrote manual copy (some of which was then re-written by the implementors) and a pile of other stuff. The story of Infocom’s success, for all its considerable talents, is incomplete unless you realize this firm that contributed so much. (The firm was acquired in 1993.)

What the scanned documents show is that anything from completed ideas (full maps, paragraphs of writing, lists) to barely considered thoughts would be sent over to G/R, who would then pull together ideas and prototypes for Infocom to look over. Some of the Implementors appear to appreciate this additional input, while others resist it. And sometimes, like this case, they do work which ends up in the final product.

On July 5th, 1984, G/R sends over a draft of the Order of Destruction for Arthur Dent’s house. It’s given to Steve Meretzky to proof and send back. Among this draft is the phrase “Domicile Demoltion Department of Randomshire County”. Steve crosses out “Randomshire” and puts in “Cottingshire”. (The book doesn’t mention what town the house is in.)

The final Order Destruction included in the package, therefore, says “Cottingshire”. But as Mike’s translation shows, the text in the alien document is “Randomshire”, the original draft.

This is a very strong indication that the choice to do the alien document as a vaguely cryptographic puzzle was done by an artist/writer at G/R and not Infocom. The choice of first draft language not used in the final draft for the home destruction order bears this out.

Is this important? Important’s a funny word. I think it demonstrates the layer of independence that G/R had in making some aspects of Infocom creations, and where the idea/creation likely came from. This might clear things up for people down the line about other aspects of Infocom, or how ad/PR agencies could work, and so on. So I think it’s helpful, and not unhelpful to have this extra information.

When the scans become public, I hope many such little things will come to light.

By the way, a spectacular weblog entry about included packaging in Infocom games (the feelies) is at the sceptical futuryst.

2 Comments

The Forgotten Chain — September 7, 2009

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.

3 Comments

Reboot — September 6, 2009

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.

7 Comments

Infocom Advertising — August 27, 2009

While I’m at it, here’s a collection of Infocom Advertisements from the 1980s. It was scanned in by Infocom Alumni to recall the many appearances that Infocom made in periodicals and other print locations. Each one had its charm, and some of them have stuck with myself and others for decades beyond seeing them.

As Fast As We Can

This is my favorite one; I remember reading it when I was 13, in either Compute! magazine or another such title, and being drawn in by this magical way of standing on the quality of your product.

For the people who don’t remember these ads, now you know why the GET LAMP site looks like it does.

Here’s some more that I like:

Some Things Never Change Our Stories Lack Imagination Put the Gnome and the Pickling Solution in the Mason Jar It Is What It Eats Oops, make that a Gondar Spell

Now there’s some quality advertising!

9 Comments

Infocom Scanned — August 24, 2009

I finished scanning Steve Meretzky’s design binders.

This was a side project and took something like nine months. I have scanned the design binders for Planetfall, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Stationfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, and of course Leather Goddesses of Phobos. In total, this is something in the range of 3,000 scanned images.

(I’m speaking of those black binders on the bottom shelf.)

It was quite a variety of stuff in there, and I really can’t credit Steve enough for keeping such amazing, complete records of his work – work which, from what I’ve encountered, that holds a special fascination for many people looking back at the history of Infocom across decades. I certainly would have been happy if it was only me who cared – but a lot of people wrote in and indicated they care, and that they appreciate what this was all about. So, on the whole, this was time very well spent. (I haven’t taken a real shot at guessing how long this took, but if I had to guess, it was probably in the neighborhood of a hundred hours.)

Bear in mind that I’m done scanning the binders but am not done scanning – there’s two more crates of documents related to general Infocom history that I’m going through as we speak, but I suspect I will only get a small amount of these before they have to be shipped away to their archival home. This would be memos, artifacts, advertising information, and so on. It’s also important, but I can only do so much while doing other stuff. So it’ll probably be a while before it all gets scanned, by persons other than me.

After the whole collection goes through a process of cleanup, removing private documents (think phone numbers, stuff somebody didn’t know was saved and didn’t want it presented in public, inc.) I’m intending to see these put in PDF form for what I hope will be legions of students and historians to go through.

Anyway, there’s a milestone for you.

3 Comments

Cutting Out Friends — August 23, 2009

It all starts out pleasant enough – we were together at the beginning, long before outsiders would even get a glimpse of what we’re up to.

Our friendship was forged when it was just the interviewee speaking, having a conversation that would stretch out to an hour or two. 60-120 minutes of footage of someone being asked to play in a pop quiz of their own life and experiences, where the best prize would be to have their story told to hundreds or maybe even hundreds of thousands. Later.

Eventually, this one hour conversation ends up as clips on a drive, long and possibly rambling statements made during that 60-120 minutes of footage. These new clips are anywhere from 2-5 minutes. The footage and I are still buddies, since the gist of everything is said, and who can blame anyone for making break points during the parts where questions are asked, or when the conversation pauses, or when someone walks into frame?

At some point, though, we enter the editing process in full force, and then the friendship becomes a little strained.

It’s hard to keep anyone’s attention these days, and especially so if the presentation is a monologue of self-directed answers to questions no longer in the footage. While the clips all have personality and verve of some fashion, endlessly showing them, repeating phrases all over, would be very hard to watch. Unwatchable, really. So cuts are made, and the footage is cut down.

If two people say the same thing with a minor difference, you want the thing said with maybe the minor difference presented to back it up. In this way, you can take two 30-second clips and turn them into one 35 second clip, and make it have all the same information.

But in doing so, you’re making quite a sacrifice – you’re choosing one person to have more screen time, to be the authority, and the second person to have to play second fiddle. It’s quite a choice.

So then, what happens when it’s 5 people – or 10? Then you start to pull words, phrases and looks together. And then your little footage friends are very angry at you.

Everything is one crazy sandwich of thoughts and gestures, of people completing each other’s sentences. It’s a fabric, really – a tapestry of the footage, woven into interlocking patterns that emerge only when all these clips and cut-down moments are placed side by side. It’s a new event, a new happening.

And at the end of it, the audience is pleased indeed. They get a woven piece of art that educates and entertains. What they do not realize is over 50 times as much information and thought is gone with each passing minute they watch. Nor do most feel they have to. But that time is out there, or, I should say, back there, twice spent (the time itself and then review of that time later).

Sometimes you have to recall what you’re choosing when you make the choices you do. I can live with them, but I am reminded, deep in this process, what that entails.

2 Comments

SXSW 2010 Panel Proposals — August 21, 2009

I’ll take a moment out of the keeping-me-from-updating-this-weblog project matrix to let you know that I have proposed two talks for the SXSW 2010 Conference. One of them is about geek documentaries, and the other is the production of GET LAMP. My intention is to have GET LAMP done this year, and therefore at SXSW in some fashion, you see. It’s nice to have hard deadlines.

Anyway, it turns out that the way they do panel selection at SXSW is kind of complicated. They’ve tried to make it easy, but it’s kind of still complicated, just streamlined complicated.

What you do is go to the Panel Picker, an interactive whosis that lets you register, and then vote various panel proposals up and down. You can read the short descriptions, and each panel selection page has a comments section that will allow the proposer, possible members, and the general crowd discuss aspects of this possible, future panel.

I’ve never been to a SXSW festival before and I’ve certainly never paid attention to how panels are picked, but it appears to be somewhat electoral in nature, with “the people” weighing forth but this popular vote (as explained on the SXSW pages) counting towards only 30% of the ultimate influence in vote. I don’t even know how that all works. But it’s obvious that having a panel nobody wants or which doesn’t get a lively amount of discussion is probably doomed. They also encourage campaigning. So, I figure I’d give you the links here.

Here’s the link to my proposed panel about geek documentaries, Tales From the Basement. My hope is to have the directors of Blogumentary, Nerdcore Rising, The Future of Pinball, and myself on this panel.

And here’s the link to my proposed panel about my documentary on text adventures, Get Lamp: Adventures in Text. My hope is to have several Infocom people and other people from my documentary on the panel.

That’s all. Now, back to scanning.

2 Comments