ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Geocities Saved! (Sort of) —

It’s an old trick: the radical faction, devoid of boundaries of politeness and decorum, blasts forward into the darkness, doing what needs to be done for a cause. In this case, the impending shutdown of Geocities, a site of much derision but also one of great historical value, relatively speaking.

Meanwhile, a second faction, related and conspiring with the radical faction, but putting on the legitimate and respectful face, goes in through the front door to speak reasonably with all the right parties, hoping that rightness will rule the day. Radical faction refuses to think this is the case, but agrees it can’t possibly hurt.

So I’m happy to say that Archive Team member Steve Webb, with tireless effort and patience, has gotten the attention of Yahoo and archive.org (which Archive Team is NOT associated with in any way) and they are all working together now to crawl Geocities. This is hugely great news.

Here’s the Archive.Org Geocities Page. As you can see you can both browse what they’ve downloaded and suggest sites they haven’t downloaded yet. Can’t really argue with that! The shout-0ut to Archive Team is appreciated too.

Along with this information came official words from Geocities/Yahoo themselves about the whole deal. They also have given a firm shutdown date: October 26, 2009. I still hold out judgment as to whether this is the actual time it will go down; after all this is Yahoo we’re dealing with and they could pull the plug at any time. But with the active attempts to get people to move over to Yahoo hosting and generally buy into some pay stuff, this turns the site into a potential moneymaker and it may very well last to that date. The radical faction will assume the worst, of course.

The internal mails I got to see don’t make it clear, but it’s obvious that some of this magic has happened as a result of the efforts of George Oates, who was booted uncermoniously and shittily by Yahoo and who landed on her feet at archive.org. I’m sure her hand played a part in this.

Also, Yahoo can’t, really, reveal “the list” of all the URLs of what’s on Geocities. Private information, say, directories where people stuck stuff and then never linked to it in an obvious fashion, can’t be given out. So we’re still doing our best to track these down through our various methods, and will continue to do so. At whatever time Geocities ultimately floats upside down at the top of the Internet tank, we’ll see what we were ultimately able to save.

Meanwhile, while we were doing this important work, 30 years of history, in the form of Compuserve, was suddenly shut down by AOL. Just. Like. That. Anyone who has information or archives they want to help get online or saved or otherwise copied out, please feel free to contact me or general Archive Team members.

The fight goes on.

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AAlib in Flash —

I am very impressed with Peter Nisch’s work in porting AAlib to Flash. Click on this image if you just like seeing stuff and playing with it:

aalib1

Peter has an excellent weblog posting about his project, including references, source code, and example images.

AAlib is one of those things that gets shown to me a lot, what with me being the textfiles guy, the site supporting AAlib being in green, and so on. It’s basically a library that will take graphic data and turn it into text, with a very large amount of control over the type of text generated. You can size it, modify things like color, brightness, and contrast, and push the text out in all sorts of ways. It’s used a lot in specific ways, generating text art on the fly being the main one.

It doesn’t stand up to hand-crafted text artwork, of course, but it’s not meant to – it can work quickly, cleanly, with all sorts of incoming data, resulting in raw or finished material you can use any way you want. And as Peter has shown, you can do some amazing stuff with it indeed. I had a great time playing with it, and I think you will too.

Oh, and did I mention that the rest of Peter’s experiments are amazing too? Go click on those bars on the right side of his site.

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The Hiatus —

3619661029_0e196bf2a4_b

I always think it’s a better situation to announce a hiatus happened, instead of that it will be happening. Then everyone’s not worried. So, I had a hiatus from this weblog.

The weblog is, this year, one of the lower priorities of my projects. Between the documentary editing, the sorting and cleaning up of my archives, my massive backup crusade, and a huge realm of other time-takers, I just don’t make this weblog the first thing I want to do when I sit down at my desk or with my laptop.

I have had some awesome trips in the past month, and saw a lot of people who I don’t feel a pressing need to name-drop as proof I hung out with them.  I got some great ideas and have some things I’ll write about here, as I find the time. I just think that doing has to trump talking about doing for the time being.

Anyway, I was gone, now I’m back. Hi there.

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Some Kind of Sixteen —

Unlike some schools, my high school allowed students wide berth in what they could put into yearbook photos and had a scattershot staff who could travel as needed to take your photo. I wanted my photo in my room (which I spent a lot of time in) and surrounded by items of mine. A series of photos were taken in both halves of my room, and the second half was used, the one with my BBS in it. (Yes, my BBS is in my senior yearbook photo). This is the other photo, recovered from the original negatives. It is 1987. I am 16 years old.

The linked-to larger image is probably better if you wish to study it closely (or print it out for your wall?) but in summary, I was deep into a couple pop culture items, a few things related to phone phreaking, and non-sequitir.

I am holding a dustbuster because in every single photo I posed to related to my yearbook, I have a dustbuster. I ended up being 4 posed photos in the yearbook, all carrying this dustbuster.

The payphone once made the mistake of not being attached to a wall very well. Same with the highway flashers (both of them) who were insufficient in their attachment to local highway construction sites to overcome an onslaught of teenaged energy. (They were not in service of warning people when they were liberated; so no concerns there, please.) Howard Stern articles and hacking articles are on the left of the photo on the door, and my wood-panelled room had a variety of other strange items, ranging from references to Max Headroom, Pink Floyd, Steve Martin, and even the original cool Maxell poster, which shines brightly from the flash of Rachel Lovinger’s camera.

When this photo was recovered, I was delighted at how clear the image was, how for better or worse it captured this time for me, deep in the time I was involved in BBSes, in being a teenager, in experiencing a life that I continue to mine for stories and references. I’m confident enough to be weird, but humble enough to look like I’m not quite sure what’s coming next. It is a wonderful picture for me to look at. I look forward to sharing more.

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A Buffet of Backwards Looking —

Here’s some links from around the internet that have captured my attention and interest in the last bit of time. I don’t often write these, but I like to think the stuff that interests me ranges from obscure to unexpected. Let’s see how this little experiment goes.

From The Past To The Future: Tim Sweeney Talks

Excellent interview by Benj Edwards about Tim Sweeney, who started Epic Megagames, worked on the Unreal Engine and Gears of War… but also was heavily involved with Shareware and adventure gaming at the beginning of the company’s life, and covers it to a pleasurable amount thanks to Benj’s excellent questions. Note that his work ZZT is all over cd.textfiles.com if you want to look it over.

1200 Baud

The Retrogeek weblog at Shardcore almost never posts, but when one shows up, it’s a doozy. This one is a great overview of cassette-based games and some aspects of the way they put all sorts of information into the cassette inserts. He has a small business example and a larger one, and even shows off a pretty crazy copy protection scheme utilizing color printing before color printing became commonplace.

Game Set Watch

When super-connected Simon Carless, editor of Gamasutra and man about gaming industry started a weblog full of little columns and entries, I felt bad because when he’d link to me I’d see almost no hits, a worrying situation. I don’t worry about him any longer, because he has assembled such a massive stable of entry posters, and sent them in so many directions, that his pages are filled, absolutely filled, with a treasure trove of gaming related information. Obviously my interests are in retro subjects, and maybe music and maybe interviews of a personal sort, but there’s such a mass of information at this site that I hope it gets remixed, sometime in the future, into the library/encyclopedia of information it already is. I can hope, right? Highlights include Game Mag Weaseling, which is a world-class overview of game magazines past and present, and The Game Anthropologist, which covers gaming communities in a way that we’ll want to check on in a decade.

ClassicGaming.com

Also known as classicgaming.gamespy.com, this is an absolute treasure trove of reviews, download, artifacts and library of games long past, featuring one of a kind OH DID I MENTION THIS SITE IS GOING OFFLINE? Yes, in the most quiet way possible (a forum post), it was announced that a money/tech decision is killing this invaluable site of gaming history and putting it into the trash bin in August of this year. Hope people can get what they can before it dies!

Hey, I didn’t say it was all going to be good news… enjoy the links.

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Long Gone —

I was kindly invited to speak in front of some college students a little while ago.  The content was free-form and I mostly tried to give some impressions about computer history, the context of what I collect, and other random thoughts that I thought would be beneficial to the students (and college employees and teachers, who also attended).

At one point, I started to talk about a lesson learned in Racing the Beam and Ian Bogost’s television filter, and out of a moment of curiousity, I asked the assembled group of 30 how many had ever, actually touched an Atari 2600/VCS console, and not played it as an emulated game or simply seen a photo.

Three had.

atari2600a

Now, that wasn’t a particularly disturbing thing for me to hear as a person who grew up on the Atari line of home consoles, including the 2600 – after all, it was introduced 30 years ago! Just as I, a person born in 1970, may or may not have ever worn a Davy Crocker hat, played with a Radioactive science kit, or actually watched an episode of “You Bet Your Life” on a television, so too should a person born in 1989 not be expected to play an Atari 2600, see an episode of WKRP in Cincinatti, or have thrown a Lawn Dart.

But what it does mean is that one has to really start taking the time to make sure all members of an audience know what you really, truly mean with the cultural touchstones you’ve placed in your writings and presentations or conversations. “Atari 2600” means one thing to some people, and different things to others, and that gulf is truly widening.

Even as I speak about bulletin board systems, I often preface an explanation of what a modem is, was, what it did, why bulletin boards were single-threaded, why people would want to do this, how they gave up their entire machine, and that machine was thousands of dollars. All these aspects of price, sacrifice, availability of information.. the times when I could have referenced these without a second thought to their context is gone.

Reading an annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories is truly enlightening – in one story he references sending the mail and awaiting a reply; and the annotation explains that mail within London’s urban center would be delivered upwards of twelve or fourteen times a day. While you could enjoy the core story without knowing that, it made the actions of dropping something in a box without using a messenger that much clearer. From that, then, you realize what a dearth of instant communication existed in that period, and how people coped with it, and what the ramifications are when you read works from the period and realize all that information was collected using different methods. It helps, it really does.

I experience this when I go to car museums, which I’ve done occasionally in the last decade or so. When you actually see a car with a 12 cylinder engine, actually see what a 1920s or 1930s era car, a gargantuan monster of metal and power looks like (can’t really sit in them), you gain a completely different perspective. I’m sure I’d have an even stronger perspective if I rode in one.

It makes my paragraphs and presentations that much more longer, but I’d rather have that be the case than a series of head nods from people who are responding to the words and not the memories.

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The 3D Lemmings Companion —

Assuming you count a published book as a book that the publisher paid you to make and that you completed and delivered, my first published book was The 3D Lemmings Companion (1995).

Unless you count a published book as being one that does all that and also ends up on shelves. Then I’ve never published a book.

3d-book-thumb-1

When I was working at Psygnosis, we always had access to games that were in the pipeline.  Some of the most frustrating aspects of this was that you’d see games that were well and truly ahead of the curve, stuff that could have totally changed people’s opinions of what was possible on a PC, and it’d sit for up to a year or two while the Home Office in Liverpool figured out how to market it, at which point the game would plop out into the ether in a sea of now-similar games developed in the interim time. It might even have all the hallmarks of what these other games were and be better (or worse) but it certainly wasn’t first, even though the code had been done forever ago. Citations: Pyrotechnica and Blue Ice, both of which were office curiousities awaiting the go-ahead to enter the wild, but just sat around like the watermelon in Buckaroo Banzai.

It’s funny that this is now the case, but it probably has to be explained to people that 3D graphics, that is, actual calculated three-dimensional interaction presented on a 2-D screen, was not always the province of additional CPUs and cores attached via crazy high-end video cards inside a chassis; in the 1990s this work was being done by the main CPU as well as everything else at once, be it sound, game logic, network interaction and disk transactions. In other words, you had all this work being done by a single CPU and so even vaguely “realistic” 3-D graphics was a miracle. (And then there’s 1983’s I, Robot which had custom math hardware, but that arcade machine was sent from the future.)

So in fact, most of these 3D games were primarily 2-D games with sprites, that is, bitmapped images, presented with scaling that somewhat approximated a 3D feel. 3D Lemmings was one of those games. Once you know that’s the trick, it’s very, very easy to see that a portion of it is 3D blocks and the rest is sprites. (Super Mario 64 also utilized this trick.)

All that said, the game was great. You had all the same gameplay as Lemmings that made that game great, and the camera movement was weird and fun, and because you were sliding around in space with these little guys doing their thing, the whole game was like real-time strategy to the nth degree. The original had this situation too, but the 3D just made it even cooler. I loved this thing.

I now forget what exactly happened that caused me to start making maps of the levels, but I did it and somehow this got back to the developers in England, Clockwork Games. A fax came in which thanked me for the maps I drew, and I was given a hint to the game’s cheat code, a hint which totally fell flat on me: Type in the name of Russia’s Love Machine. “Rah Rah Rasputin” was a huge hit in England and Canada, you see, but not in the US. So it wasn’t until I was at a dance in Toronto a few years later and heard the song that I went “ohhhh” quietly at my table.

When I was asked to join the little start-up that came out of the closure of Psygnosis US in Boston, it was primarily to have me write a full and complete book of 3D Lemmings hints and walkthroughs. And over the next couple of months, I did it, creating a 150 page book.

As a testimony to my youth, I did all the illustrations to demonstrate how you would do the 3D walkthroughs. And here’s where it gets weird.  I did them all in Visio, the 2-D drawing program meant for diagrams, flowcharts and sketches. I basically used triangle and square primitives to construct these maps, of walkthroughs I devised myself, through all the levels. I can’t begin to explain how much work that was, other than to say it was a lot of fucking work.

I finished this book, and it was delivered to Prima Publishing, who would have printed out the book, except the game didn’t go blockbuster, and they decided to pass on it. So my book technically never saw the light of day. But I did finish it!

Sitting somewhere deep in my collection of disks is a copy of that book, with all the diagrams and whatever. Maybe, if I’m lucky, it’ll pop up in my life again and I’ll make it available on here, in this entry. Until then, remember what I learned: you can make a living doing games, especially if you’re willing to shove your face fully into a grindstone for interminable amounts of time.

Wait, that’s a horrible lesson.

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Paper and Geocities Update —

I’ll just combine these two while I’m here, since they’re just updates on ongoing projects.

PAPER

I have a lot of magazines. Did I mention that? A lot. A whole lot. Being made to split them out and get them into special bins instead of scattered among my belongings like sesame seeds means I’m starting to see the size of the pile. Right now, if I had to guess, I would say I have between 3500 and 5000 magazines in the house. Bagged. In bins. As I’m going through them, I’m kind of amazed at the variety – I tend to keep everything. And not everything is magazines, either.

Therefore, I’ve split off the catalogs and “ephemera” – stuff I thought would be good to save before it disappeaed complete. These will be cataloged at a later date. And when I say ephemera, I really do mean all sorts of randomness: convention programs, tickets, posters, how-to booklets, handouts, you name it. Some has meaning, some doesn’t, but all made me think they needed a chance to arise up a few years down the line.

So now the paper.textfiles.com site has a few more improvements: additional stuff catalogued (600 issues), descriptions of some properties put in (temporary, not researched), and I fixed a columnation issue that made it split “Summer 2006” into two issues. 

GEOCITIES

Archive Team is still downloading Geocities; no surprise there. Right now the canonical collection is about 530gb, and covers, basically, a metric ton of stuff. I don’t have hard stats at the moment; it takes way too long.

There are now several branches working on this. One branch is using the archive.org crawler. Some of us are direct downloading things. I have crazy scripts doing crazy things. We’re setting up a service where you can see if we have a copy of a given URL in the archive. And so it goes.

I intend to have us keep downloading until we either run out of things to download or Geocities is shut down. And believe me, once you start responding mentally to the URL “geocities.com” in reading stuff online, you realize how many things were using Geocities as the central information repository, for better or worse. Dude, shit is going to break when Geocities shuts down. Just to warn you.

I have an incredible group of people helping me and everybody’s getting a big hug when we move to the next phase: sitting on top of the pile and going “WOOOOO HOOOOOOOO”. It’s a ways off, though.

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Halo Renderings —

I suspect I should really go back and do a “Halo” tag for these entries, there’s just too many of them. But I hope the things I’m talking about have a more general usefulness beyond this specific game.

So Bungie (makers of Halo) have a new beta feature in place. Here’s a lovely video showing it off:

Yes, that’s right, that feature is cold blooded murder. It’s also the ability to take a game, record portions of it, and then render it out to a WMV format, which you can then place anywhere, like on youtube. In the movie above, I’m the guy in the white armor, who couldn’t believe his luck in how a player moseyed up to my platform without even noticing I was there (again, in pure white armor) and began wistfully shooting away. I did the only right thing.

The thing is, there are filmmaking tools here. And they’re not really all that crude, either – you can sweep your camera around, choose to go Point-of-View, head fast and slow, and change the speed of everyone as you go. There’s tons of capacity to render out shots and then edit them later in other software, now that we have the ability to turn them into WMV files and drop into an editor. In the case of my clip above, I went for maximum humor, starting things a number of seconds before the action: why is this guy running? Where is he running from? What is he up to? You watch it and then only at the last possible moment do you realize he’s a victim. Depending on your sense of humor, it’s funny to be side-swiped like that, with an unexpected arrival of a second character.

Along that way, here’s another film of mine I put together:

Wherever you aim your sniper rifle, any other weapons you switch out will precisely mimic the exact point you last aimed with the sniper. So the Rocket, which is normally a pretty crude aiming tool, can utilize the scope-magnification of the sniper rifle and then be switched in for the big hit. In default mode, the movie above’s a little hard to see, but in HQ mode, it’s pretty clear what happens when the rocket hits the guy hiding up in the rafters. Notice, too the sound, which has a stereo, environmental feel to it.

The choices I made with the camera angle, moving back and forth, and so on, are all cinematic, done with my filmmaker’s eye. And as I indicated, there is very little gap between what I want to accomplish and what Halo’s controls have provided for me.

One last one, just because I think the sound is very interesting. I’m the guy in the floating vehicle (called the “Ghost”):

It’s quite amazing how the whole thing sounds – according to press reports of the time, Halo 3 is capable of 100-channel sound, but it’s the recording of the stereo separation that gets me. Machinima has gotten to be a pretentious word, so let’s just say that there’s a little movie studio buried in this first person shooter, and that’s fine with me.

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Bring on the Pain #6: Netflix —

Continuing the riveting story of one guy with a perfectly fine documentary trying to go to all the distribution points that well-meaning people tell him in endless fan letters he should go to.

Previous pain coverage was here:  Introduction,  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5.

On with the show!

From: Submissions <submissions@netflix.com>
Subject: Netflix Submission of "BBS: The Documentary"
Dear Jason Sadofsky:

Thank you for your submission to Netflix.  We have received and reviewed your materials.  
Unfortunately, we are unable to make "BBS: The Documentary" available through Netflix as
a direct account.

Please contact Victory Multimedia to make your title available for rent on Netflix.  Victory
Multimedia works with many independent film producers and small distributors.  If you wish to establish a
distribution agreement with Victory Multimedia, they will represent "BBS: The Documentary" directly to
Netflix. You are under no obligation to work with Victory Multimedia and the link below will provide you
with a full list of distributors to choose from.

The following URL will take you to this list:

http://www.business.com/directory/media_and_entertainment/home_entertainment/distributors_and_wholesalers/ [www.business.com]

If you wish to establish a distribution agreement with Victory Multimedia, please contact Randy Freeman
at Victory Multimedia at your earliest convenience.

Once again, thank you for your submission and we look forward to making your title availablefor rent on Netflix.

Sincerely,

Netflix Submissions

Just so we’re clear, I submitted my information and DVD set to Netflix over seven months ago. Seven months passed before they sent an e-mail telling me that they don’t deal with small distributors/individuals for Netflix.

Will I call Randy? Sure. A phone call’s cheap, as I just wrote an entry about. But since most “distributors” take a massive chunk out of the price, I am not so sure I’ll go that way.

Onward.

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