The Millbrook Round Table — February 15, 2009

My oldest friend, Chris Orcutt, went into his local hangout, the diner of his town of Millbrook, NY, and discovered that the local paper was closing its doors. Chris had worked on that paper over a decade before, as a true newspaper man, for a period of time, so it had a particular and personal resonance. So he did what he does, and wrote about it: Farewell, Millbrook Round Table.

This is a town small enough that you could stand at one end of the main thoroughfare, shout, and be heard on the other. From the outlook of people who have never known a time without television screens, and especially the outlook of people who have never known a time without an Internet, a local newspaper seems perhaps on the level of a ice block delivery. Chris gives it the right sendoff, as a personal story. He also shows the skills he learned working there, and some of what is beginning to disappear, just as a t-square and compass has primarily disappeared from the hands of people who call themselves designers.

Good riddance, say people who don’t know what they are saying good riddance to. We have Google News, say people who do not understand how this will blend that charming region of New York from a sharply focused observation on paper to a blurred reference on news services online.

Chris’ story is excellent. Take a moment to read it, if you have time in between skipping among RSS feeds or skimming hundred word summaries of distant atrocities.

6 Comments

A Valentine’s Day Memory — February 14, 2009

Based on my memory of the arrangement of the classroom, I believe this happened around the 4th grade. That would be 1980.

We were given a writing assignment, our nascent class of future citizens, where we were asked to write about Valentine’s Day. Specifically, the teacher wanted origin stories. “I want you to write about how Valentine’s Day came to be, and how we come to celebrate it.” It was due in a few days.

The kids set off immediately on this task, creating fun stories of tribes of boys and girls and the one day the tribes would meet, or about how there was a place called Valentine where there was love and puppies and we celebrate that day. They no doubt had a lot of fun making stuff up.

However, I was sure, even then, that there was some real story. At that point I was doing an enormous amount of reading; there were these construction paper “bookworms” one teacher had put outside our classroom door, where a student who was reading could get a segement of the worm for each book they read. My worm stretched to the next classroom and went around that classroom’s door. Books change you, and depending on what you read, your outlook on the world is one of the things that change. Whatever combination of books I read at the time told me that there was, underneath this holiday, some origin involving people making a choice to have the holiday; it didn’t just come out of the air and making it up entirely wasn’t the path to accuracy.

Likely I got a pass to go into the library and went around until I found an encyclopedia. I would have looked for an entry on St. Valentine’s day and read the story of St. Valentine as that book described it. I recall it mentioning a martyred individual made into a saint, although I am likely to have confused the order in which people traverse from “martyr” and “saint”, thinking it was a Saint who had been Martyred. Kids do that. I used the dates of his death and indicated that it was a celebratory feast to honor this Saint and that this feast led to the giving of valentines.

Obviously it would have had flaws and I’m sure that a good teacher would have seen where I swapped around phrases and taught me about using sources and so on. It’s a difficult subject, research, but I obviously had the skill set, or at least the desire, to learn how to be a good reading citizen and get my information from actual sources instead of making up fanciful stories about how things are.

But I didn’t get a good teacher at that juncture.

No, in fact she failed me out, or whatever cuddly term they use for getting a zero or no star on an assignment. This wasn’t the point of the assignment, she said. It was a creative writing assignment, and I’d not been a creative writer; I’d been a researcher.

Obviously it had some effect on me at the time and stays with me, as I can recount that episode with striking clarity where I can recount few others from early grade school, other than that one time I couldn’t get the attention of a teacher in first grade for bathroom permission and ended up getting new pants from the school nurse, or the time the vice principal hit me. Most of that period is pretty much a blur.

But somehow, that feeling of helplessness, of telling what I thought was the truth (and which obviously had some refinement ahead) and doing the work to find out what was real and what wasn’t, and being told this was unwanted, has stuck with me for thirty years. Perhaps you’ve seen traces of my rebellion against this cavalier attitude to research and information in my later work.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

13 Comments

Bring On The Pain #5: CREATESPACE — February 10, 2009

When we last left my adventure into digitial distribution, I said that I was going to report things as they hit crossroads or conclusions, just to not cause too much noise in the process. Well, all the people (well, all dozen of you) wondering how that is going can now hear about Createspace.

Createspace is an Amazon.com company that functions basically as an on-demand publisher for books, movies, and music. They seem to set themselves up as a sort of Vanity Press 3.0, where you get the extra bonus of being hooked into Amazon.com’s other properties, including Video on Demand (VOD) and being able to have your stuff sold through the main Amazon.com site.Â Now, bear in mind that I already sell my documentary through Amazon but this was the only way to get it digitally offered through them.

I suspected that the process would be all fucked up because I’m not a desperate teenager selling a 1 hour movie about how his friends are all able to play hard-boiled cops in their city’s alleys but still can’t shave. I wasn’t disappointed in that measure.

This whole “I finished my project and produced a nice package for it and it’s actually a massive mini-series” thing isn’t really going to do me any favors. For one thing, everybody thinks in the basic unit of the Amray Case, that shitball black plastic thing with the plastic sleeve that you can shove the crappy one-sided paper label into and drop off for a buck. I used to get annoyed with people putting their documentaries out this way but everybody wants them to do this: the duplication people, the selling people, even people who would otherwise benefit from nicer packaging. So yeah, having this crazy custom package kind of messes the little machine up.

Additionally, the fact it’s not one but 8 documentaries, that REALLY messes stuff up.

So here’s the details.

I filled out the createspace form and got assigned a title ID. I was given some stuff to sign out and mail along with my submission. For my submission I sent in a shrinkwrapped copy of the documentary. I mean, why not do it right, right? This was in late December of 2008. On January 14, I got the following letter:

Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:10:14 -0800 (PST)
From: "donotreply_1@createspace.com"
To: jason@textfiles.com

Subject: Materials Received
We have received your materials for "BBS: The Documentary".
We are now in the process of setting up your title(s) in our
system. Our normal setup times are as follows:
DVD source copy - 10 business days from receipt of all
necessary materials including artwork.
Tape source copy - 15 business days from receipt of all
necessary materials including artwork.
Amazon Video On Demand - 60 days.
This is the length of time from when we receive all of your
materials to when we ship your proof.
Once we have finished setting up your title(s), we will
produce a proof copy and mail it to you. These proofs are
exactly the same as the final units that will be sold to your
customers. Your title(s) will remain on hold until you
receive the proof copies and approve the title within your
account. If you have a multi-disc set or collection please
approve all discs/titles in the set or collection.

Instructions on how to approve the title and make it
available will be included in the package with the proofs.
For support, please visit https://www.CreateSpace.com/Help
Sincerely,

CreateSpace, Member Services

Note that line about multi-disc productions: “If you have a multi-disc set or collection please approve all discs/titles in the set or collection.”Â Seems pretty straightforward.

So now it’s February, and I got this in the mail:

Hello Jason,

Thank you for using CreateSpace for your self-publishing needs.

We are sending this message to notify you that your title 260216 has
been rejected as a Video On Demand- only title.Â  I sincerely apologize
for any inconvenience.

You have sent in three discs under the same title ID. Yet, at this time
 we do not offer support for multi-disc sets for Video On Demand.

If you would like complete a title setup for each disc, please feel free
to attempt submission as such.

As stated, I apologize for any difficulties or inconveniences. Thank
 you for your patience and attention to this matter.

If you encounter any questions or concerns, please feel free to send
us a follow-up support request via the following
address.

http://www.createspace.com/Support

Thank you and best regards,

Kelly
CreateSpace Member Services

Several things to note here.

First of all, the time from sending it in to “we can’t use this” was roughly 2 months. So understand that this is how things tend to function; you have a completed project, and you could shove it into any DVD player in the world and watch it, but even under this optimum condition, you still have this extra two-month tumor between finished and finished. It’s no wonder people like the immediacy of video upload services like Youtube and Vimeo (and now both support high def to various degrees).

Second of all, this is quite the bait and switch. Apparently my multi-disc project I sent in CAN’T be used as it is. If, perhaps, I took each of my three discs and submitted THOSE? Could I THEN do it? Obviously I would have to whip up three different “part 1, part 2” covers and so on.

So then I wonder if I can do something to fix all this, and more importantly, will I ever see that copy I sent in again? So I mailed a question about this and what the deal was. Here’s that letter:

Hello Jason,

Thank you for contacting us regarding multi-disc sets.

Through Amazon Video On Demand, we cannot accommodate
multi-disc sets. In order to list these discs as AVOD titles
then you will need to create three separate titles and pair a
disc to each title. If the DVDs you submitted are
distinguishable as three separate titles then you all you
need to do is indicate which disc goes which title. However,
if all the discs were submitted under a single title, then
you will need to resend materials indicating which disc
should be paired with which title ID.

For future reference, we do offer the option of creating
mutli-disc sets, but only in physical DVD format.

I hope this information is helpful. Feel free to contact us
with any additional questions or concerns.

If you need more help with this issue, click here:
http://www.createspace.com/Support

When contacting us, please be sure to reference your Case
Number: 00330810

To be honest, talking to people through this fucked-up cut-and-paste language with all sorts of back-from-10-feet language kind of turns me off. At this juncture, it sounds like I would have to go through a number of hoops to make this go video on demand, and I’m not really interested in those hoops. Maybe in the future I’ll do it, but for the moment, meh.

So there we go:

CREATESPACE RESULT: STALLED.

Yeah, I could take advantage of their put-it-in-shitty-amray approach, but that really doesn’t do it for me.Â I have a little less than a thousand copies of this movie in the attic and I’d rather those go out the door. If I make a shitty “you missed the boat and now we’re in re-issue-land” version, I’ll take some effort to make it so.Â When I have time, maybe I’ll go through the machine again, but for now it seems like too much work for little benefit.

AND THERE WE GO.

How awesome will my other digital distribution attemps go? Stay tuned!

5 Comments

The Trough of No Value — February 6, 2009

It is very rare I simply link to another site’s article, and say that I have no further comment. This is one of those times. Perfection: The Trough of No Value.

I wouldn’t change a word.

3 Comments

What Is BBS? — February 5, 2009

From: King Jables
To: Jason Scott
Subject: BBS

I know that you'll probably think think that I am a complete imbeceil for asking this,
but I keep seeing the abbreviation "BBS" on your website. What exactly was a "BBS",
and why should the advent of the internet have signalled it's demise? I mean, if people
liked them so much then surely all the retroists out there could have continued them
with legacy machines, right?  But seriously, what was a BBS and what did it do?

Yours perplexedly,
                          Jables.

Jables, I get mail like yours occasionally, and I do sometimes wonder how people find my e-mail but don’t find all the rest of the material explaining BBSes or explaining what the whole thing was about. I get enough that it’s likely not a hoax and I’ve definitely gotten mail from people who are barely as old as the textfiles.com site itself, wanting to know about this history. So let’s quickly cover it.

BBS in this case stands for “Bulletin Board System”, although at one point people would use the term “Bulletin Board Service” when they were trying to make money at it. This quickly got shortened to BBS, an acronym which has at this point been overtaken as referring to Baumgartner Brand Schiltach aluminum car rims. This is part of why it’s so hard to search for auctions on Ebay or general webpages about the subject: it’s all about the rims now. But once, it was about these old computer systems.

In its most fundamental form, the BBS was simply a computer connected via a modem to a phone line. On the computer was software that, when it detected that someone was calling the modem, would pick up, connect, and then provide the calling person with a menu. From this menu you could post and read messages from other users, send or receive files, or play games.Â

First created in 1978 by Ward Christensen (software) and Randy Suess (hardware), this setup lasted with only basic changes up to nearly the present day.

Some people added more phone lines (and the ability of people on different lines to talk to each other), while others integrated their BBSes into other networks, like early Internet, or had their BBS pass around messages to other BBSes by calling them.

What happened to BBSes, especially as it looked like they’d be around in some form forever, was multi-threaded connection to the Internet, especially Trumpet Winsock, a program that allowed PPP (Point to Point Protocol) on Windows systems. Â With the availability of this and other programs to provide PPP and SLIP access for home computers, where connections to the Internet at large gave a world of abilities to machines previously tethered to single BBSes (or no network connection at all), BBSes were essentially smashed against the rocks. (The first three months of 1995, I have found, broke the BBS “Industry” in two.) This was all replaced with Internet businesses, be they websites, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or software developers, all aimed for the new new thing. BBSes, especially in business, were a taboo subject, as they represented the old guard, the old failures.

BBSes had, of course, the ability to be connected to via the Internet, but the capacity and abilities of the World Wide Web (or HTTP protocol) are very shiny, very new, and the needed growth and new userbase that would replace the older userbase drifting away simply wasn’t there. BBSes started a long fade that continues.

Of course, there are still many BBS-like things, like web forums or comment sections or anything else where the people reading a site can contribute by posting, and these conversations, jests and jousts now replace what BBSes once were. They’re different, sometimes better, often worse. But that’s what happened to them.

That’s about the best I could put it. I made a documentary about the BBSes and keep a site full of old BBS relics, and I occasionally speak about the subject. I think the time when they ruled the earth was fantastic. I miss it sometimes.

6 Comments

A Stack of Paper — February 2, 2009

In the mail, from Ross Kerr (who has been sending me similar packages), came a small stack of Computerworld, a newspaper-style trade publication covering all aspects of computer technology. This particular stack is from 1987. Some are in not so great shape and some are pristine. They’re obviously ones that were sent to a business, because they have the classic multi-colored “Received” stamp on them.

So, for the benefit of the folks at home, why the hell would I want old newspapers like this? Why would anyone care? And why do I happily take these in (and ask if you have any, to send them to me?)

The thing is, history can be a very funny thing. If you don’t keep around some evidence, some pieces of what came before, history itself becomes malleable clay formed into whatever needs or biases are currently existing. Left alone, in other words, people lie or innocently malign history into something it never was. Keeping even a slight pile of evidence from that time is an easy antidote.

But let’s go further than that.

Obviously, one big advantage is that you get to say “Wow, things were different back then.” This is easy enough: words are used differently, graphics are differently arranged, and priorities are different. Companies huge from the year of these papers, a mere 22 years ago, are bankrupt, mere echoes of themselves, or huger than ever. Faced with selling ideas that we would now accept without question (one photo here shows an article about people “betting on” TCP/IP as a network protocol), these decades-ago technologists, reporters and sellers had to make their case from thin air. Minicomputers? Network printers? Token-Ring? Print-Spool hardware? All of this had to be proposed and then indicated as being a superior choice of what came before. This paper record I have (and of course, paper records are often digitized) will tell you exactly what happened then.

And by exactly, I don’t mean they didn’t lie.. There are promises wrapped in newsprint here that never saw the light of day, and predictions off by parsecs. I just mean that the fact that these items existÂ proves the thought of them, or the approach to them, existed in 1987. The graphic design existed. The technology to make newspapers in this fashion and with this binding. The photographs. The referenced machines. Names of people. Names of companies, of products, of places. All are captured here. That may have relevance. That may not. But it’s here.

Of course, the simple uses of this sort of collection pop up again and again: look how expensive things were! Look how weird the machines look! Look at how little the capacity was!

For me, that motivation has lost its zest; I am now swamped and in personal control (not to mention the collections others have) of tons of evidence of this basic fact that computers cost more and had less ability, back then. I don’t need to make much effort to prove this, although it does help to be able to specifically and exactly point to the retail prices of machines when someone goes “back then, computers cost this muchÂ and could do this” and a quick reference back to this material shows them to be soaking wet. But “gotcha” only goes so far.

No, I think what these pieces of history really do is serve as solid foundation to build new ideas on and maybe avoid certain mistakes. A dropped name, a specific promise, and you research those further to find out what worked and what didn’t and maybe avoid the minefield that came before. Maybe. People have an amazing propensity, faced with a blood-soaked hall of stabbing machinery, to think that somehow they’re going to come out of the other end unscathed and claim the prize. So be it. But at least in these pages I or others can reference how very long some ideas have stuck around. For example, the Cloud. Or gigabyte drives. Or Sun when it was a viable computer company. Â I get an enjoyment out of knowing I might do my bit to help people look back with a more informed eye. It really does make it happy.

And maybe it’s just an old man talking, but I think they’re beautiful, these now-solved mysteries, these peeks into an unknown future that is now the known past.

4 Comments

Conspiracy Rocks! — January 31, 2009

A little funny story has come to a close and you’re going to benefit.

I’ve mentioned it before; when I was in college, I did the animation and art direction for a parody of Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, called Conspiracy Rock, about the Kennedy Assassination (done to the tune of “A Noun’s a Person, Place or Thing”).

It played on Comedy Central. It played at Sundance. And now you will get to see it for free.

Seriously, the weblog entry I wrote about it tells you more than you could ever want to know about this project. I’m in debt and thankful to the director, Scott Rosann, for making it available. Thanks, Scott.

4 Comments

Green, With Envy — January 29, 2009

Ah, it’s like Christmas, or maybe just like finding something broken downstairs. When a rush of people come to this site for the first time, perhaps because of a prominent posting or my causing trouble in other circles, the opinions arrive with them, variant and colorful. I find people with all sorts of opinions on the writing, and people with ready-baked positions on assumptions that I didn’t even recognize were assumptions. It’s refreshing, like a herd of buffalo going through your shower is refreshing.

So, buried among this flood of people, like clockwork, will be a sprinkling of people who will let me know their opinion on my aesthetics. Or, to be more succinct:

WHY THE FUCK IS THIS SITE SO GREEN

Of course, they express this in all sorts of ways, like “Jesus Christ My Eyeballs” and “I tried to read what he wrote but I could only make it a few sentences in before I had to give up for all the green and white text.” Now, we’ll set aside that there’s no green and white text and seriously, this isn’t exactly running through a wall of fire, but OK, I got it.

So then I go into this little side loop that I tend to do under such circumstances. I consider alternate configurations of the style sheet. I wonder about programming in some sort of cookie system to allow you to choose, which is much easier with WordPress now that I converted to it. I re-imagine a way I could flitter around the system and make some changes to get into the black-on-white bus and go down the line to mainstream acceptable, allowing these fine folks to concentrate on the substance of my writing, and not the eye-searing green of it.

But you know what?

I call up the weblog’s front page to look at it and begin this task, and I just stop dead.

I mean, I just sit there and I fuckin’ smile. Not an evil smile, like I’m putting poop in your mailbox. I mean the smile you get when you smell the boardwalk, or hear a forgotten song that played at your favorite dance. It’s the smile of nostalgia, of happiness, of a simpler time. I mean, I am in a total other placeÂ just by looking at my weblog.

I remember the 3279 I used to use at Dad’s work at IBM. The screen looked like this:

I’d sit in that side office while dad did his required work, and it’s where I first played Adventure, and Hunt the Wumpus, and a whole bunch of other stuff that was mindblowing to a 10 year old. I mean, it was just so great.

At school, I’d be using a bunch of Apple IIs. I don’t mean the Apple IIs with color displays. I’d be hooked up to one of these babies:

Oh, fine, it didn’t say “Linux” on the screen and it didn’t have a machine 1000x as fast sitting next to it glowing blue, but it would have the double disk drives and it wouldÂ have that great glowing light on the keyboard and it definitely had this beautiful green monitor, with the sharp-as-a-tack letters on it and the clear font telling me that if I’d just sit down and play with it, magic would happen.

Hell, forget being specifically young. From when I was in my 20s, all the way to the present day, nothing tells me that fun is about to happen than seeing one of these around:

Trust me: adding a VT-220 dumb terminal into the mix is like adding a punch bowl full of alcohol to a literary event: cool shit will ensue. I know, just seeing that beautiful text there on that self-enclosed little machine, that the world is waiting for me and once I start typing, I will have things to explore.

I promise you, I sit down often and think about modifying the site. I think about the people claiming my site is actively hurtingÂ them without being the direct reciever of my insults and litanies. I know that for some people it must be like staring into the very face of Hell, the glittering eyes of The Unnamed One piercing into their skulls and leaving tiny scars on their retinas.

I feel for you. I want to help you.

I can’t. I am powerless.

The green wins.

21 Comments

Conversation With a Dead Guy — January 28, 2009

OK, so because I wrote some stuffÂ about my opinion about black-box shared resources and its consequence on data sustainability, I have gotten a lot of attention from a lot of people, some positive and some negative. We’ll set the positives aside, and most of the negatives, as well. Many negatives are from people who confused “don’t trust and don’t assume the best of” to mean “never use under any circumstances and lordy gee this new technology scares me“. Some utilize the term “cloud” in their business plan or career and so we can’t be having anyone saying it’s.. you know, overused and drilled into meaningless at the present time, and in other ways misleading. All well and good. Glad for the chat, people! I’m sure we’ll do coffee and quibble about this more in the future.

But there were a couple, only really a couple, who took a different tactic altogether, much more interesting for my purposes and perspective. That tactic can be stated as follows:

I am happy to say that I don’t care about my data.

This is a nuanced difference from “who cares”, which is more germaine to someone who walks into another person’s opinion and doesn’t agree. You don’t care about the opinion, don’t completely side with the choice of words, but probably have some common ground. You just don’t think it needs discussion, or don’t feel like hearing the discussion. You don’t care.

This is different. This is willful glee/pride in that you don’t care about your stuff.

So here’s the pages by the two guys, Â Rob Sayre (Webcite) and Victor Stone (Webcite). Note that I have to include webcitation (archived) links to the pages since they have clearly stated they don’t particularly care about the viability/sustained life of their data.

In both cases I show up and make unpleasant responsive noise. In both cases we either agree to disagree or I am handed a suggestion of medical diagnosis. Â What’s also interesting is that one is relatively young (Rob) while the other relatively older (Victor). Then again, perhaps the spectrum of folks who take their position go all over the map.

Either way, the fundamentals are completely skewed from where I come from. To Rob, the desire to protect or maintain one’s creations/data/information is egoism:

Using the Cloud doesnâ€™t mean you have to trust it. The catch is that you have to not care, which is not really a catch, since the alternative is that your Stuff ends up owning you.

To Victor, there is a pride in handing away and not caring about things, informational, physical, or otherwise.Â

True story: some months ago my wife and I sold our house. Let the lease expire on the car. Gave away ourÂ 500 books. Gave awayÂ 2,000 albums. Let go of all the furniture. Berkeley restricts trash pickups to just one can so there were lots of trips to the dump, includingÂ all the musicÂ Iâ€™ve recorded for the last 35 years. I figured I was saving my kids a trip to the dump after Iâ€™m dead.

Contrast with my hero Mark Pilgrim’s post which falls among similar lines. He equates divestment of material and things to be the key to happiness, and I could totally see this position; he portrays them as steps along a personal goal, and thinks others should do the same. He makes this point in a cute manner, devoid of judgementalism and (for that matter) context. Where I am abrasive, he is clever and smooth; I totally understand that. As I’ve said in several contexts over the last week or so, you catch more flies with honey, but I prefer to just use a flamethrower. Still, Mark’s posting, more a numbered poem, is a goal for some, just not for me.

In the case of these two other fellows (and ones like them), there’s a sort of approach to life with regards to “stuff” that’s certainly different from mine; fundamentally different. I think it can be stated, quite clearly, that I DO have an attachment to stuff, to things, although I do make an effort to understand the people behind those things. That inherent drive to maintain and collect things is not a point of shame with me; it’s a point of pride, as I like to think it is for any archivist. To tell me not to archive is to tell a musician not to make music, a craftsman to not build, and Jim Aikin to not be a misanthropic jerk. It’s in the blood. It’s not in everyone’s blood.

Now, far be it out of line to point out that someone so deeply associated with the maintenance of open standards and doing engineering in Mozilla would be a little less dismissive about wanting to protect data, but that’s just me way over here.

But Victor, well, that guy’s just dead.

Dead, dead, dead. In the ground. He’s done. What’s left for him is lying about and doing some hanging out with family and friends before he finishes scooping up handfuls of dirt and patting them on his head, gingerly. I feel quite free in making this declaration, just like he decided he didn’t like the tone of my entry, presupposed a series of silly, non-related declarations, and then responded poorly when the person who he names in the entry title shows up to chat. I loveÂ people like this, because it reminds me that for all the unpleasant things I am, there are many unpleasant things I’m not.

What I am notÂ is gleeful in my mortality, looking at my time as this sort of placeholder, where I did some stuff and then I’m doing everybody a favor by getting rid of it as quickly, cleanly, and comprehensively as possible. I don’t take prideÂ in that. I don’t look at myself as a sad little consumer tube, pulling in stuff one end and then blowing it out the other, into the trash. This position is particularly silly one for a musician, because musicians are the very heart of creation, just as sermonists are; they bring out things from the air and their minds and make them available to whatever degree life presents them. They literally create something from nothing, save the caloric requirements of a functioning brain. It’s a miracle to behold, one of life’s great examples. As a music guy, you’d think he’d get this. But he doesn’t. He’s dead.

Death comes to us all; this is true. And it’s true that at the end of your life, the remnant traces you leave to others to solve, the puzzles of financial woes and commitments and unpaid human debt might be an unfair bequest, but not all bequests are unfair, nor the act of bequesting itself. I have been through the works of many people who are no longer with us, and I’ve spent times recording and listening to the stories of these people and returned later to find them gone. This is what happens, and yet I do not feel burdened to have known their stories, or, in some cases, given things from their lives by their survivors to help archive or maintain. I am honored.

Maybe my relationship to “stuff” is different from these two guys, but it might go further than that. Maybe my relationship to everythingÂ is different. And when I’m done, or finished in some physical or effort-related manner, I would hope that I wouldn’t look at the result as trash to be discarded before someone else must regard it, but a life well spent and a body of work/collection worth sorting through, while I myself am dead.

8 Comments

Rolling On The Floor Meowing — January 27, 2009

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of attending ROFLthing, a smaller form of ROFLcon, the Conference of Internet Memes. Held in New York City, it was a one-day event with a collection of speakers, guests, and as it turned out, a couple hundred attendees and press/documentary people. As one of the speakers, I had the opportunity to present about Sockington, the little grey cat with the thousands of followers. (He had 10,000 on Saturday but is at nearly 13,000 now.)

As I spent the week before slamming away on my presentation, one of my friends asked why I was working so hard when I can do some sort of presentation in my sleep, especially on a subject I know so well. And the answer, really, was that I don’t want to sleep through my own presentation; if I don’t keep trying new things and attempting more trickery and showmanship backed up by research and preparation, I will stagnate. No thanks.

The presentation, entitled EGAD TUNA, included an OpenOffice Impress presentation, which had many dozens of slides and is located here (12mb). If you want the short-form, it’s this:

I’ve been internet famous before.
I enjoy this Sockington thing.
I did it by combining a cat and twitter.
It was initially fun.
It continued being fun for social experiments.
It means a lot to people (and to me).
I will keep doing it.

Along the way, I try to bring up some points about the process that involves Sockington.

I like to walk a venue before I work on a presentation for it, but I didn’t really have that choice in this case.Â

I also chose an unusual getup, which seems to be more and more what I like to do in high-profile situations. It may or may not help the presentation itself, but it lends an interesting tenor to photographs of my stage presence:

Mentioning as an aside, there were a group of people who self-styled themselves as commentators on the event, acting as if heckling was some new and refined art. At twice their age, I’ve seen and heard better, more incisively, and delivered with more punch. I ended up having to deal with them before and after the presentation, in my own way, and some people acted like this was more special or unusual than one might encounter otherwise in a non-academic presentation. Let me dissuade you immediately; when alcohol or camraderie-inspired bravado enters the mix, it always results in some silliness from the back (or front) rows. It’s up to the presenter to be quick on their feet to deal with it.

Normally, I endeavor to record my own presentations, but there was just too much on the plate this time and I’m depending on others to have captured it. I thought I got all of what I was trying to get across, and if there were pauses and stumbling, it was mostly centered around the undependability of my remote-control clicker and feeding off the tenor of the crowd.

A long time ago a very smart man told me to never act like my potential audience had been saturated, and to never be surprised that more and more people would hear of me the first time, and this was certainly the case here; in the days hence folks have found my other work or more about me from this speech, and written in. We can sometimes convince ourselves that we are more prominent (and relevant!) than we actually are.

I’m most proud of this slide:

What I am saying is that sometimes we can be a little too judgemental about what others do, and decide the relevancy/usefulness/meaning of that activity based on our own preferences. I tried to be as succinct and yet funny as I could about it, but the situation is serious: so many people weigh in and decide what others should do, and think they’re being clever or insightful with their observation. They’re just not. Link them to this graph all you want.

The other slide I liked was listing all the crap that’s gotten me attention over the years. See how many of them youÂ know:

And see, right up to the minuteÂ with the mention of the Anti-Cloud thing which I will not discuss in detail at this moment.Â

In summary, I am pleased with the presentation. I’m sure some copy of it will come out someday, and until then, you have the PDF to play with.

As for the rest of the conference, well, I am really unhappy that it was so short, because the combination of being interviewed, talking to people I never get to talk to, making new connections and running around meant I saw very little of the other presentations (except You Suck at Photoshop andÂ AlexisÂ Ohanian‘s introduction), and that makes me sad. (Bre Pettis‘ presentation about rapid prototyping was very similar to one he gave at the Chaos Communications Congress a few weeks ago, and I saw that video, so that at least didn’t escape me.)

To list friends seen again and not seen again seems needlessly indulgent and weird, but I do say that I am impressed both with the variance of lives that come to these (people complain it’s all rich white college kids and they are deluded) and the new acquaintances and friends I make as a result of these. As someone who spends a lot of time working through data and concentrating on the activities of machines, I drink up opportunities to find out what else is going on, and so far the ROFL people are 2 for 2 in terms of absolute success. I look forward to more, maybe just from the seats next time.

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