ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

PinPin, Or The Fun Injection —

I found myself at the Lyons Arcade in Colorado in the company of Robb Sherwin and Dayna Rich, two people I’d met in person just earlier that day. Robb had been interviewed for Get Lamp, and the two of them had impulsively come along with me on my next stop, to interview the owner of Lyons about his project of love that has borne some amazing fruit.  That whole day, which ended up in a French restaurant with my third interviewee of the day, Paul O’Brian, is one of the highlights of the whole production.

In the arcade, the owner had a number of items for sale and I always make an effort to buy what I can when faced with neat stuff, especially stuff that I find particularly hand-made or low-run. And what he had was a stack of  DVDs called “PinPin”.

I bought a couple of these DVDs (I believe PinPin #3 and PinPin #4) and went off to the other interview and the excellent dining experience and eventually back home.

This has turned out to be one of those impulsive purchases of mine that has paid off a hundred-fold.

Some people have the Marx Brothers, or Mel Brooks, or recordings of comedians that, no matter how many times they watch or listen to them, still get joy and laughter out of them. That’s how it is for me and PinPin.

Here’s the setup: PinPin is a set of completely non-sequitur documentaries showing snowboarding, Jackass-like stunts, music videos, trailer parks, Rubik’s cubes, and pinball.

And, well… that’s pretty much it. There’s no overarching plot or theme or lesson – it’s just shot after shot of people from a Colorado-based community (although some of the shooting has taken place in New York City, California Extreme events, and Chicago) and all mixed together in an insane washing machine.

I was reminded of my relationship with these documentaries (there’s 8 of them in the series, although only 4 of them are on DVD) when I had a friend over at the hacker space I hang out in. We have a nice big projection screen and can run off a PC, and while waiting for other people to show up, I popped in PinPin. My friend was horrified/amused, but I was just laughing away, clapping for joy at shot after shot.

It’s hard even to describe why I find these so hilarious, so let’s save some time and send you right along to the site. It immediately blasts music at you, by the way.

Imagine someone, like myself, says “you have to check this place out”. You know I’ve got my own place, and so you think “well, it’s going to be more like that” and as soon as you walk into the place, someone hits you with a giant inflatable chicken. Then they set themselves on fire. Then they announce the water-slide is open and everyone, carrying full buckets of gin and vodka, start jumping headfirst down a slide that goes into a kiddy-pool. Well, it’s kind of like that.

There’s a review on the back of the videotape for The Wizard of Speed and Time (my all-time favorite film) that says, roughly, “There is more joy in one minute of The Wizard of Speed and Time than all of the Star Wars films put together.” I will paraphrase this and say There is more documentary feel and wonder in one minute of the PinPin films than in most major documentaries. Here’s why.

The free-form feel is incredible. There’s almost no sense of meaning behind what gets shown, other than fleeting themes of a single person’s exploits happening for a few minutes. Occasionally a stunt or event will be split up into multiple chunks across other shots of the same person, like when one fellow snowboards down the multiple rooftops of a condo development. You aren’t sure he’s going to do it, and then he fails, and then you see him try again, and then he succeeds. You might see someone eating food strangely, then see them fall headfirst into a trash can. Maybe you’ll see someone driving like an idiot in the middle of summer, then a shot of them falling over in snow. Add in cases where the footage is grabbed off TV, grabbed from local news stations, grabbed from all manner of video equipment, locations, quality.. and it just never gets slow for me. While the meaning of the overarching movie might be vague, the way they cut to the chase, and have a hell of a lot of chase to cut to, always blows me away when I watch it.

It’s so easy to get hung up on the quality of the footage when you’re making a film. You obsess over every angle, every placement of lights, how the focus racks from the eyes of your hero to the background of someone walking in. You time everything as best you can, take multiple shots of the exact same setup, wrench the life out of a scene to get it technically perfect. This does not happen in PinPin. Shots are fuzzy, hand-held, shot at night or out of trucks or into the sun and I just don’t care. I have such a great time watching these lives, these trailer-living, pinball-playing, play-acting and fucked up wonders, I just go off the deep end watching it. It keeps me sane about the whole thing. I choose to do the films the way I do. I don’t have to. It cuts a lot of pressure off, believe me.

Now, maybe you’re going to mosey over there, and maybe you’re not. Maybe you’ll see these films and wonder what the fuck I see in them that’s so great, or maybe you’ll be laughing right there with me. Either way, I bet you have some film, some wondrous thing that transports you to another place when you’re watching it, every single time. Take a shot at enjoying mine.

2 Comments

Halfway —

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3 Comments

Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse —

A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it.

AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. It shut down on October 31 of this year. If you try to go to a site that used to be hosted there, you are forwarded to a weblog entry by “The AOL Hometown Team”, that says this, in total:

Hometown Has Been Shutdown
Posted on Nov 6th 2008 1:30PM by Kelly Wilson
Dear AOL Hometown user,
We’re sorry to inform you that as of Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Hometown was shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely, The AOL Hometown Team

And that, my friends, is it.

There was a weblog posting on this same site, informally, on August 4th, letting people know AOL Hometown was being shut down, and maybe you should make an effort to get it. Officially, though, notification was sent out (how? In what way?) on September 30th, giving people essentially 4 weeks to figure out how to get their data off the servers, find a new place to send the data, get that arranged, and then do the transfer.

Of course, many people may not have been checking their e-mail. Some people might have had un-working e-mail and not been notified. Some people might have not understood how to make things run.

Go ahead and read these comments. They’re heartbreaking.

2.  Is there not a way to obtain the blogs anymore. I was unable to transfer them before oct 31. Please let me know if there is anyway to get them. Thank you Sandra

5.  My question is like those above. Is there anyway still to retrieve my hournals and homepages? I tried before the deadline but nothing happened. These are my memories. Things I wanted to remember about my kids. And when I tried to access them before the deadline I was unable to. Otherwise I would have printed it all out. Please help.

12. WHERE IS THE HOME PAGE IT TOOK MONTHS FOR ME TO BILL. I DID NOT RECEIVE ANY NOTICE VIA THE MAIL OR E-MAIL. PLEASE HELP ME FIND MY WEB PAGE SO I CAN COPY IT AND MOVE IT SOME WHERE ELSE.

17. What happened to my web page on my husband, Bob Champine, that took me many years to put together on his career and which meant a lot to me and to the aviation community. I noticed with 9.0 I lost the left margin and the picture of him exiting the X-1. I need to restore it to the internet as it is history. Please tell me what to do. I will be glad to retype it, I just don’t want it lost to the world. I need help. Gloria Champine

It’s all fine and good, those readers who sneer and say “you get what you pay for” and “ha ha, losers”. But the fact is, these people were brought online and given a place for themselves. Like a turkey drawn with a child’s hand or a collection of snow globes collected from a life well-lived, these sites were hand-made, done by real people, with no agenda or business plan or knowledge, exactly, of how everything under the webservers worked. They were paying for their accounts, make no mistake – this was often provided to them as a tool combined with their AOL accounts. Some were absorbed from other companies as AOL purchased them. Some of these websites had existed for a decade.

Some people didn’t back things up. Some had moved on. The data, however, stayed where it was, for years on end, and if someone happened to not be online for 4 weeks and be prepared on short notice to retrieve their stuff, then they were well and truly fucked.

Browsing the weblog that represents where these tens of thousands of websites used to go, you end up facing Kelly Wilson. Kelly Wilson is like the fucking Grim Reaper of websites. If you browse this collection of her postings, you can see she’s primarily doing the same thing: “These sites will be shut down. You better get your shit off because that’s it, it’s gone. You have 3 weeks. GO.”  One of these sites being shut down is Ficlets. Read this weblog entry from the creator of Ficlets and try not to have an emotional reaction.

If you’re going to start composing something at me with a salad of sneering and a dash of cynicism, just fuck off right now. We’re the failures here. We failed them.

Our little technorati, our people who cry for open source and beg us for money to Fight For Electronic Freedom and make their rounds at all the right cocktail parties at tech shows.. where the hell are they now? We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.

It’s an eviction; a mass eviction that happened under our noses and we let it happen.

I’ve been evicted before – I was kicked out of a boarding house I used to live in between 1992 and 1997. Eviction laws were in place and I was sent notification after notification, shoved into my mailbox, left under my door, explaining my rights and how to appeal and how much time I had. It was done during the summer months, because winter would be a hardship. It was handled coldly, nastily, but it was done according to law, and luckily, I had a place to move onto. (They were closing up the building to turn it into professional space, which it is to this day.)

When we evict people from their webpages, fuck all is required.

And before you sneer at AOL people, these people who trusted AOL: how about your Flickr? Your Facebook? Whatever the hot new wig-wag that you’re dumping hours into without thinking about it? What, you’re paying for something? Check this recent event out, paying subscriber: you have shit. Because of a cascade of EULA and Best Practices, and most importantly, a complete disregard for the importance of this data, we’re going to let it happen again. And again. And again.

Think your site is untouchable? Think again, pokey.

What am I saying here?

I’m saying that, like a real eviction, there should be practices in place. When you open your doors to hosting user content, you should have rules in action that, unless it’s a complete and total fire sale and you have no hope of even staying open that long, then you should be required, yes by law, assholes, to make the data available to customers for an extended period of time.

There’s business opportunity here, for warehouses of data that can take in, say, AOL Hometown, and hold it for a year or longer, allowing people to acquire their data over the course of that year. With legislation or even the kind of peer pressure you all used to dupe people into Creative Commons, you could have this be the norm from this point forward.

If you tell people they can upload their content, you should have a clear and distinct way for them to retrieve their content. People do it ad-hoc as they can, but the abilities of most people, the people without an engineering degree or years of experience, to get back what they put up is minimal. It’s not that important. We should make it important.

How many more times will we allow this?

How long before someone takes a fucking stand?

Update: This page got an awful lot of attention, and so I decided a clarification was in order.

76 Comments

Undistilled Amazing —

Fine, I’m prone to writing some pretty negative things. Let’s spend a quick respite with me marvelling over a site done right.

To qualify with me for being a site that’s above and beyond, you have to fulfill some pretty deranged criteria. First of all, you have to do something few others can do. Next, you have to do this unique thing very well. Third, you have to be consistent, and show you’re in it for the long haul. And finally, you can’t slowly turn the experience into one of misery after I have glanced at all your amazing.

Lots of sites fail at some or all of these criteria. They’re not fair criteria and while I myself try to live up to them with my sites, I don’t always succeed. I like to think none of my sites are getting progressively worse, but I will readily admit a lot of time will go before they get better.

But once in a while, something comes along and just blows me away. In this case, it’s the site Live From Daryl’s House, a site where Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates…

No wait, fucking come back here.

Hear me out.  Hall and Oates were a pretty good band, smooshed as they were in the era of a lot of junky pop and a lot of strange mixtures of MTV and Top 40 Radio. Maybe their music appealed to you, or maybe you were hit over the head with it too much and didn’t give it a chance, or maybe you weren’t born yet when they were all over the place. 

There’s a lot of bands from the 1970s-1980s era who still occasionally perform or do what they used to do, to slightly smaller audiences, or who do it to pretty big audiences but they don’t have the cachet of cool that were spot-welded onto them by whatever cocaine driven marketing department made you think of them all the time when they were top moneymakers. Some of these bands were not very musical, and some were very musical but we only heard a certain amount of that musicality when they were a part of a machine that was screaming “HIT HIT HIT” every 12 seconds. In my opinion, Hall and Oates had a big dollop of the second group.

The last time I’d even thought about Hall and Oates had to have been over fifteen years ago, when I impulsively bought a stack of their records (records, motherfuckers) at a used record store (used record store, bitches) in Kenmore Square (Kenmore Square, kids, before it got turned into a food court). I didn’t actually listen to the records, but stored them, somewhere, where I bet they probably still are. In other words, I knew them enough to know they were interesting but not enough to go through the effort of really digging into their back catalog. What I’m saying is, I’m not a SuperFan over here. I’m just someone who knew of them.

But somehow, about a year ago, I stumbled onto Live from Daryl’s House and was blown away.

Here’s the setup: Once a month, Daryl Hall and his team of musicians (some of them date back to his original band) get together with a guest artist and play some tunes. In between the tunes, they show footage of them working out songs, or talking about history, or discussing wine, or what have you. It is fucking fantastic.

What makes it fantastic, first of all, is that you find out that this is a talented group of musicians, doing this music. Left to stretch things out, the songs that have been around for 20+ years gain new life. With the addition of the guest artists, many of which I’d not heard of, the songs take on new dimensionality. With the insight into the beautiful space that Daryl lives in, you get a feeling like you’re visiting.

As far as I’m concerned, this is what the whole podcasting thing was supposed to bring around – relatively dirt-cheap productions where we got some good times and information while gaining new perspectives on things we already knew. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts, and I’ve listened to a lot of uninteresting, boring podcasts, and let us not dwell too much on the ratio of those, and while you might think it’s “cheating” to rely on Hall as an example of things working for a podcast when you percieve him as a burnt out rock star husk, well, what can I say?

I can say shut up and go to the site.

Yeah, it requires flash and hoo hah and shut up and listen. These songs are fantastic. And as of this writing, there’s 12 months of shows, each one with 5-6 songs, meaning over 60+ songs you can listen to, ranging from ballads to rockers to introspective, almost redemptive pieces. This is great stuff, and with each new guest artist we hear great takes on his songs. Essentially, I again repeat, for free.

This wins my Undistilled Amazing Classification because this entire thing represents that sort of seemingly-unattainable pipe dream of just a few years ago, when I was buying that album stack at the record store. Could I in fact listen to Daryl Hall at any time from anywhere in the world and watch him take his old songs on with various newer artists and learn about those new artists at the same time, and enjoy the whole trip while doing it painlessly? WHAT ARE YOU, DEMON SPELLMASTER, I’d say, and then eat my whatever-it-was-that-made-me-fat-in-my-late-20s. I’d spill crumbs everywhere making fun of you and your insanity; this time would never come to pass.

But it has. I wish this site was mundane and Yet Another Of These Sites, but they’re generally not like this at all. The amount of respect afforded to the audience is huge. You get to go where you want to, enjoy what you want, come back as many times as you want… you’re just absolutely left to soak in as much music and history as you want. From this site, I’ve learned about new bands worth checking out because they stood with Daryl and came off great. It’s a great test; you see how they perform in this, a real setting, and you can tell yourself “these people aren’t just showing up to the studio and belting out a few lines into Protools and then going back to their hotel room”. This is the ultimate audition tape to see if a new band is worth my time.

So there you go, buddy. A site I’m blown away by. Go hang out with Daryl a while. He came out the 1970s and he’s rocked my 2000s.

He’s makin’ my dreams come true.

Ooo, ooo.

HEY, COME BACK.

5 Comments

Circle of Jerks —

I get angry like fire gets burning. Ask around.

In some ways, this is a helpful trait. Get my anger going, the really good cherry-colored flames of pissed-offedness, and I will mount a juggernaut assault leaving the anger-inducing party absolutely miserable. You can be assured that I will follow through on my anger and turn it into a finished “work”, whatever that may be, regardless of outside opinion on the wisdom of that approach. This is not web hubris. Ask around.

On the other hand, if the party hadn’t thought through the ramifications of what they’ve done, or even better yet, see absolutely nothing wrong with that they’ve done, then I make a whole new enemy. On the frequent times I misstep in life, these non-fans have occasionally shown up to chortle and point. I move on regardless, glancing at that significant scar I gave them across their face, and realize that they should be given a little understanding as to why they’re taking such joy in whatever my current mess-up is. Such is the price of exhibiting such anger as I am capable of.

So be aware I put a waiting period on this article, before even starting to write it. I gave myself over two weeks on this one, friends. I let fourteen days go by before a single word was written here. That’s fourteen redemptive showers, a few miles of walks, and dozens of alternate projects and distractions. And I’m still pissed off. So realize that you’re seeing a post that is dulled with weeks of cooling off. If it’s still hot to the touch, so be it.

If you haven’t heard me talk about Peter Hirschberg before, let me summarize by saying I absolutely love this man. He’s part of a small group of individuals I’ve known in my life, people like Al Kossow and Gene Buckle and Jim Leonard who are like Scrubbing Bubbles going around Life’s Shitty Bathtub, making everything better behind them for having come into contact with them. I’ve been to his wonderful arcade a number of times since he finished building it. I’ve been following his work for well on a decade. So let’s establish that right out. I am a fan.

I also knew about a documentary he was part of, called Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade. I knew about the work he’d done on it, from animation and titles to helping make a promotional arcade at Sundance when the movie premiered there.  And when I finally had a chance to see the movie at Peter’s arcade earlier this year, I flew down for the chance and didn’t regret it at all. I don’t think anyone’s made a movie like it and I don’t know if anyone will again. So I am a fan of the movie itself.

Another movie came out at the same time and eclipsed Chasing Ghosts. Let’s not go into that too much, since it’s beside the point, but feel free to decide this somehow makes me unusually sensitive about the fate and future of Chasing Ghosts. You’re wrong, but ultimately it’s all irrelevant to where I’m going with this.

The Chasing Ghosts movie languished for well over a year, with the ultimate fate of the project up in the air. I and (I assure you) many others chatted with Peter and with other parties associated with the movie about how this thing needed to come out, that it’d be a shame if a film with so much wonderful historical footage and with such interesting things to say just disappeared off the face of the Earth. Peter knew this, and I knew his frustration, but it wasn’t his film to put out, not his money to lose, not his project to determine. He’d done work on it and was a part of the team but others held the property and were working along their own ends.

However, a little context here. At any given time, I’m tracking a whole load of documentaries that are in production or just finished. And by tracking, I mean I’m corresponding with, or on the phone with, or sending along material to people who are making documentaries. Some of these are subjects I wouldn’t cover in a million years, and others are of a subject that fills my heart with joy that somebody, somewhere, is going to do work in this area that interests me so much. The combining thread of all these projects is that the people behind them believe in them and in some way discuss or know of me and my work and we all chat about stuff. Sometimes I’ve given them cash and materials. Other times I’ve just given a pep talk. Some of them have fallen to the wayside as life and reality blew out their tires. Many are years into a project and will one day likely finish them, and I’ll be right there to shake their hand and take none of the credit, because there’s none for me to take. It runs the gamut. I assure you. Within this collection of documentary people are the people who made Chasing Ghosts. I didn’t pay money into it. I didn’t help. I just watched and chatted with Peter about it. There’s your context.

Ultimately, however, news came through: it was going to show up on Showtime, which if you’re not from around here is a movie channel on cable. They’ve been around a hell of a long time and as it turns out they’ve diversified to a collection of channels under the Showtime brand. They’re in a lot of homes. They cost money to subscribe to. They’re a real entity. And now this documentary was going to make an appearance there. A couple dozen appearances, actually. With some detective work, I found a listing of all the times it was going to show up. And in fact, Peter found out at least one showing was in HD. Since the movie was shot in HD, this was going to be a big deal. Money changed hands for the film being shown, and the film was going to get nationwide play. Good news. Very good news.

I’ve built this up enough. Let’s do it.

Here’s the thread. If they start deleting or changing their posts, don’t worry, I have a copy.

The thread is on a webforum for the Killer List of Videogames, which is an excellent resource for arcade game collectors, keeping track of the data associated with arcade games, and a bunch of ancillary facts about arcades and the industry of videogames. Like most such situations, the web forums are a jaunty little sidecar bolted to the main site. I am not discussing or judging the main KLOV site. I am not discussing or judging the KLOV webforum in general. I am discussing a thread on a webforum.

The thread is started by Peter Hirschberg, and is simplicity itself; a link to Showtime’s website to the scheduled showings of Chasing Ghosts. Here’s a guy coming along, who helped in his way to make a movie, letting people know where they can see the movie. Everybody should generally say thanks and move on. This does not happen.

A range of messages are the usual whines about not having access to Showtime. Fair enough.

“Bahhh, I don’t have Showtime. :(“

“Me neither. Release this on DVD already!!! :)”

“Good to know a network picked it up. Too bad its a premium channel. Still, a lot of people will see it and I’m sure Showtime has built in rights to broadcast it through other sister networks eventually.”

Within a short time, the calls come out for people to rip the Showtime show and put it somewhere for people to download.

“Can someone please capture it and put it on a friggin’ DVD for the rest of us who don’t bother subscribing to lousy channels like Showtime?”

“someone dump it on the newsgroups!”

And with that, comes the hue and announcement of the heroes who will do the heavy lifting of turning this broadcast into some sort of “ware”.

“Someone has to have a TV tuner/Media Center that can record this. If thats possible, Ill do the rest of the work and put it out there for everyone.”

“I’ve got a DVD recorder that hooks up to my TV and Cable Box allowing me to burn taped shows from my DVR to it. I’ll tape the Dec 3rd showing and send you a copy for upload. Just remind me via PM about this.”

“Someone has to have a TV tuner/Media Center that can record this. If thats possible, Ill do the rest of the work and put it out there for everyone. Its not hard work, just need to get a copy. I have other movie channels, but no Showtime, otherwise it would be out there.”

“Heres an idea for all of you who say they would pay $15 for a copy. With satellite, movie channels are $12/month. Why not pay the $12, get Showtime, cancel it at the end of the month, and record the show? Easy.”

This is to be expected.  It is the modern era, after all, and if there is one doctrine that has progressed itself forward more than any other, it’s “If I can get it, it is mine.” Hard to argue with, really; a show is broadcast into your home, and within the confines of your own home there’s this easily duplicated entity, so you do what you want. Perhaps it’s not entirely wise to announce you’re willing to commit copyright violation on a public web forum, and perhaps Michael Hay (“brotherhay”) should think twice about announcing his willingness to do it so openly, but that’s his rope, his little dance. And really, when you think about it, saying that you’re willing to do something is not the same as doing it.

The environment is about what I expect when faced with something out there, something relatively easy to duplicate like audio, video, data or program: give it to me now, for free, and get past anything I perceive as a roadblock to me getting it. If you overcome these roadblocks and give it to me for free I will consider you more worthy. What’s taking so long?

Hirschberg himself is no fool. He realizes that broadcasting the episode on Showtime is guaranteeing its immediate duplication and transfer. He realistically points out the best quality version of the broadcasting schedule (HD) and why people should focus on that one:

“Was also just informed that the screening on Dec. 11th at 2:30 in the AM will be in HD. If you’re going to Tivo it that would be the one to record.”

“Tivo” in this context is pretty easy to discern: to copy. The show is being broadcast, it is going into homes with consumer-grade recording devices, it is going to be copied. Peter is at peace with this and while I don’t know the opinion of the other creators of the film, they can’t be expected to be floored by this turn of events. So let’s say that at this point, all parties are in agreement. The movie’s going to go be copied, and maybe in the future a DVD with extras will come out, and there we go, life in the present day. Gimme Gimme and where’s my show and all the rest of it.

Of course it doesn’t stop there. Let’s take a step back to talk about screeners.

Let’s go back a bit. Let me say that I have direct corroborated information from people I’ve interviewed about such things that a film like the original 1977 Star Wars was being passed around between a set of people who technically should not have had access to this film, before the film appeared in theaters. This happened. The reason it happened is because for many, many years, films have been available in one form or another for private showings. This was, at one point, the way to have it evaluated by management and distributors for eventual showings in theaters. A distributor would get a copy of a film, see it well in advance of release, and decide whether or not they were going to show it in their theater chain. Oh, sure, they could rip a copy using a transfer method I don’t feel like going into, and this most certainly happened, but to call this situation a limited distribution would be putting it mildly. I have no doubt that copies of these not-yet-released films ended up in other countries or in private collections. Movie reviewers, when they wielded power, would be shown pre-released films, and some of them in the comfort of their own homes or in local theaters where all the critics in the surrounding area and some general press as well would show up for a showing, all in advance of this official release date.

Duplicating film to other film is relatively a pain in the ass. Gaining access to reels of film from a distributed print of a as-yet-unreleased film is slightly more of a pain in the ass, then becomes much less of a problem after release. But people overcame these older roadblocks, just as they overcome the roadblocks of today, tiny as they may be.

The advent of videotape, however, changes this radically. Even though ghosting will probably occur, you can re-use videotape. It’s very compact, and easy to ship. And you can copy from it pretty easily, even though the copies will be pretty shitty, all told.

But again, videotape is pretty easy to move around compared to film, and everyone has televisions, and if the choice is to see a film for purposes of review or judgment on videotape or not at all, the entities in charge would prefer you see it. So videotape, over time, has won. DVDs have since supplanted the original technology, but the idea has stayed the same, even if the whole “gets really crappy with each successive copy” part hasn’t.

These pre-release available copies are now called screeners. They are given to various folks for various reasons, from the aforementioned judgement (Oscars, other awards) and review (reviewers, press) to general industry stuff (Pee-Wee Herman saw a review copy of Frankenweenie and chose the director of that film, Tim Burton, to direct Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure). They are part and parcel, often, of making a film; you might have a case where a star is being asked to make a cameo appearance or narration of a film being worked on, and they will be sent a screener of the work print (the in-process version) to persuade them. A film with masses of special effects or production houses will send rough cuts to these contractors so those contractors can start making decisions about how to go about adding effects.

This then, in relatively short form, is what we mean by “screeners”.

Chasing Ghosts had a screener. This screener was of the rough cut of the film, with music that hadn’t been licensed yet, sound mixing that wasn’t quite complete, and editing that was still in flux. Sequences were in there that got changed around. Footage would be added in other places. But in the rush to get to Sundance, you have to have films somewhat ready in advance of the festival and you choose to get stuff out there and show it without spending too much time on polish. This is especially the case where you intend to sell this film to someone; then, by that thinking, you have to do what you can to get into something high profile like Sundance and do a little monkey dance and hope beyond hope someone will buy it.

Some people don’t have the time to see every film on the schedule. So, in those cases and in the cases of press and reviewers, the creators of a film make a screener available, a DVD that explains what the film is and which then shows it in whatever state it was at the time of the DVD’s creation. Information on contacting the creators is usually always created, and some even go as far as putting “SCREENER” or “NOT FOR SALE” at the bottom of the frame for the entire work.

Chasing Ghosts’ screener had different music, different editing, different sound mix, and was very simply not done. It came on a DVD. It was made available to a set of parties.

One copied it and handed it out.

That’s how it goes.

But on this webforum, in this place where one of the creators of the film had generously mentioned how to see the film, someone took it upon himself to distribute the screener he had acquired some time before. Right then. Right there.

That person was Mattroid.

“geez mod, stop beating around the bush So who wants a torrent?”

“here”

It was, of course, trivial to find out who Mattroid is, unlike the good old days when there was at least a token attempt to keep one’s handle or username consistently obfuscated to prevent detection by driven parties. Mattroid is Matt Miller of Houston, Texas. He runs ArcadeCrusade.com.  His birthday is June 6th, 1982. Here’s his XBOX Live Account. His ICQ Number is 9315159. His AIM is arcadecrusade. His WII number is 1945 6732 4818 3591. Between all this, any particularly interested party should be able to track him down and ask him his motivations for distributing a copyrighted screener.

But you see, what angers me isn’t that he distributed the screener; it’s that he did so within a day or two of the legitimate release of the film, the release that was the final cut, all out there and ready to be snatched up by the self-styled heroic copy-paste crowd.

By putting this screener up when he did, Miller totally undercuts this film. It didn’t take long for the torrent to make its way from Mininova to the Pirate Bay and points beyond. And when the inevitable searches for “Chasing Ghosts torrent” rained in, what people found (and continue to find) is the screener. The not-as-well-edited, missing-parts, unpolished screener. What a douche.

Here, though, is when the rabbit hole goes deeper. And here is where I really get angry.

Miller invites commentary, and justifies his actions based on the flawed presumption that purchasing (purchasing?) an illegally duped screener gives him worldwide resale rights:

“Hopefully someone will get a good encoding of the Showtime HD version and share that one. But this one is good enough. Let me know if anyone has any problems. Also, if anyone is pissy for me sharing, let me know that too.”

“What I paid for the copy was fair and for the disc/case/shipping only, but that’s why I put it up on a torrent. This saves time, trouble, and shipping fees for those who can download it. The only difference is that the rip I uploaded is obviously lower quality than the DVD. I could have uploaded the DVD image, but that’s a download over 3GB, so I figured I’d encode it so it’s a bit smaller and easier to download. I assume the HD version will be up shortly after it airs anyway.”

Peter Hirschberg returns and, quite naturally, is horrified the sub-par version is now out for release just a matter of days before the “official release”. Taking up mattroid’s solicitation of comments, he makes his opinion known:

I don’t like the idea of a screener being passed around. In my opinion it takes it even one step further than piracy – sort of like when an author’s unpublished or unfinished manuscript gets leaked to the web. It’s just not a cool thing to do to steal something that was never intended to be seen outside of a specific group of people.

If this is a screener I’m not even sure if what you are watching is actually the finished film. I have no idea how it got leaked (I guess how they always get leaked) but why not just wait another day or two and watch the fully sanctioned Showtime version?

Like I said, who the heck knows what state the screener you are passing around is in. I know of a bunch of changes that were made to the film after the film festival circuit, so it’s definitely not going to be what shows on Showtime.

-Peter

This direct confrontation, however, is a little too “real” for Matt Miller, because he doesn’t deign to respond to Peter once in the thread. He continues to post in it, of course, but a co-creator of the film he just happily pirated and spread to the world is not who he wishes to talk to at this juncture. What a coward.

The thread then contains the usual technical discussions related with bittorrent and xvid-encoded videos: how to make bittorrent work, determining audio problems, what is the best program for downloading it. Matt Miller responds to a “thanks, mattroid” post with this:

And thanks to those who passed it around via DVD who knows how many times before it finally got into my hands. Why it hadn’t been torrented before, I have no idea. Does that make me the bad seed or the savior?

Peter, naturally, gets heated about this situation and summarizes things perfectly:

Maybe because if the people with effort and time vested in the film torrented it Showtime wouldn’t have wanted to buy the rights to broadcast it for money? And why torrent the screener the week the broadcast is on cable?

I would rather thank all the people who passed it around and did not torrent it. Thank you people – for not torpedoing the efforts to get this movie shown for the first time to the general public, at the very least on cable.

Jessus people at least take this to another thread rather than talk about bootlegging the movie I worked on in the thread I started.

I’m sorry, I am a grump. Eff it.

Now, here’s the thing. Peter gets insulted for this.

What follows is a picture-perfect set of examples of how bad things have gotten. These are messages to the creator of a film about the distribution of that film:

“Re: why torrets.

Because your efforts seem entirely focused on making sure people DON’T see the film. You honestly think Showtime’s (a niche network to begin with) FIVE IN THE GOD-DAMN MORNING schedule is realistic? Sorry I don’t have a DVR. How about YOU pretend I stayed up all fucking night and recorded it on my DVR which doubled as my laptop? I end up with a digital copy either way. Instead of bitching about people downloading a copy of something your crew won’t bother to sell on DVD or show at a sane hour, or release to any theatres – AT ALL?”

“No one was touching it with a 10 foot pole before it was shared. PARTICULARLY THE CREATORS. What makes you think anyone gives a shit now? You can’t blame filesharing like the music industry does when their products suck or are mismanaged into the ground. Let me guess. You’re a chairman of an American automotive company?”

“Believe me NO B O D Y will ever get rich off a movie about arcade games, most people have NO idea who any of these people are nor do they care I am really surprised showtime picked this up instead of PBS. I’ll buy it sure-if they ever release it(their Only chance at making any money) But if I end up owing the DVD I’ll probably only watch it one more time and stick it on a shelf.”

To be sure, there are plenty of voices in there to speak at least some amount of logical sense. This is not a united front:

Peter, I have to say, I’m sympathetic to your complaint. I assume Showtime’s check is in the mail and they presume this film would appear online in some context. This is the risk of 21st century film distribution. I hope you have been well compensated for your digital expertise, it was the highlight of the film; almost like a character in itself.
I’ll be first in line to buy the DVD, once it materializes. In part from a guilty conscience but also because I know the film makers deserve compensation.

To put this thread back on track…Peter, great job on the animation. I’d love to see some of those clips on your site, and maybe a few additional ones if you have some WIP stuff. I too am anxious to buy this on DVD. I actually liked it as much as KOK, and would love to see some of these topics in even more depth. Let’s just hope they can put out a good DVD release with some deleted scenes or other backstory (except for Robert’s “art”).

Let’s talk a little about Robert’s “Art”.

There’s a scene in the original cut where someone pulls out erotic art he’s purchased. It flipped people out at the Sundance screening, and it was cut out of the final mix, because it didn’t need to be there. In other words, a natural and progressive improvement on the movie. This is what editing’s about; it was distracting, changed the tone of the piece unnecessarily, and wasn’t germaine to the final work. But the thread is filled with references to this scene, that is, references on a copy that has a much better version released just a day or two after the torrent is released. A complete, total undercutting of the new work.

The whole thing drives me up a wall, even now, even weeks after I read this.  It doesn’t help to then see the endless, judgmental reviews of the people seeing the documentary, declaring the people in it losers and worse because of their recounting a hobby from 30 years ago for a film. To watch collectors of arcade games insulting people who were once high score champions on video games is, to anyone even 20 feet away from this subculture, like watching people in fursuits insulting a documentary about people in fursuits who play in a band. It just doesn’t scan, folks.

I found the movie uplifting, inspiring, enjoyable. But I’m me. There’s a scene where two people show how to use masking tape to beat Activision’s Barnstormer for the 2600. I found it amazing. But that’s me.

What have a learned from all this? Don’t let Get Lamp out of my sight until it is completely, utterly polished. Don’t trust a single person with it. Don’t drop it for quality control purposes except in situations of maximum control. Assume the worst.

This is a horrible lesson. I look forward to forgetting it.

But not today. And not this month.

Dude, fuck people.

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Bring On the Pain #4: Undercover —

The aforementioned project for digital distribution of BBS Documentary is not dormant or dead; I’ve sent out a bunch of packages. The reason I’m holding back from going “I’m going to mail to this place and that place” on this weblog is mostly because I say the most awful things about everyone at long stretches and I don’t need some skimpy-brained digital distribution maven deciding not to take my product based on some arbitrary measure, like this guy thinks we’re all a bunch of fucksticks.

Now, granted, I generally do think that they’re all a bunch of fucksticks, but that shouldn’t be the deciding factor in whether or not a place accepts my product as a possible addition to their digital ranks. I’ve already stated on here that I’m generally fine with a place doing a few limited things to my film to bring it online, with some marked exceptions like embedding advertisements that make it look like I’m endorsing the highest bidder who decided to spread their peanut butter across my documentary’s face. These limited things I do allow are stuff like DRM (as long as they don’t expect exclusive access to my stuff, i.e. people can get the movie elsewhere) and taking some major piece of the pie (as long as the price is generally fair or doesn’t imply I’m getting the bulk).

The vibe I get from a lot of distribution firms is that they think of “content producers” as a gelatinous mass of yammering whinebags, all thinking their little predictable flick is the absolute be-all-end-all and demanding a dozen black helicopters for the privilege of sinking cash into promoting their little bang-bang love story. Most of these places are, naturally, getting bombarded with horseshit. A constant, endless din of absolute horseshit, as people send them mind-numbing projects filled with stolen content and half-baked scripting. And because of that, a lot of the things I’ve had to sign and pages I’ve had to click through are designed to basically ask one fundamental question: Are You a Deluded Retard? (Y/N)

I’ve generally done N, although in some cases I’ve had to say Y and not deal with them because that entity’s idea of “Retard” is “Actually wants to maintain ownership” or “Isn’t all that hot on being given a couple tuppence for each copy, while we open our bags and get piles of gold coins”.

I think my favorite one was one digital distribution site that said We are not in the business of funding your movies. I consider the back-and-forth conversations that must have led to that codicil.

I maintain my promise to you that as each digital distribution adventure comes to a close, I will summarize here, including process of sending out stuff, what I was told to do, and what came of it. But for the moment, I just have to continue sending things out and assure you that Agent Jason is working deep undercover for your amusement.

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The Holiday Rush —

I’ve got quite a busy amount of projects for this upcoming couple of weeks.

The movie is getting a lot of love, in the form of direct editing time. I expect to have days where I’m doing nothing but editing for 12 hours at a stretch. Hopefully this will lead to some workable sequences and rough cuts very soon. Along with that comes the wave of e-mails to the small army of supporters and people I’m doing related work with, the musicians and graphic artists and coders and people armed with soldering irons. The word we’re looking for here is “flurry”. So that’s going on, I promise.

There’s massive piles of papers here waiting to be scanned. I absolutely hate the software that comes with scanners, and I was recently given a pointer over to a program called Vuescan. What a difference! Instead of concentrating on being some crappy photo album/document messer program, Vuescan functions as a “scanner console” where it is negotiating the pathway between the scanner and the filesystem, getting in the way as little or as much as one needs. It can automatically take a scan and save in multiple formats, and it can be tweaked on the go. It also gives me instant feedback on what I’m looking at/scanning so I can see how it’s going. This may all sound obvious but there is a lot of really poor software out there for scanners. I expect my scanning productivity to be way, way up.

That said, tragedy strikes. I just scanned 300 sheets of paper and have discovered that my HP Scanjet G4050 scanner is adding a white line to all scans. It’s called a scanner streak in the scanning biz, and it absolutely sucks. After the current round of scanning this thing’s banished. I’ll be picking up something a little more worthy of scanning one-of-a-kind artifacts, shortly. Let’s do a shout out for the masses: THE HP SCANJET G4050 THAT I OWN IS A PIECE OF GARBAGE. Luckily, the streak is so consistent I can create a mask to remove it, but it’s a needless step in what has otherwise been a delightfully easy scanning process. Once I optimize it, this office is going to have a lot less in the way of to-do piles.

I spent time at Blip Festival 2008, and while I think other people are better equipped than I to talk about what a great time it was, I continued my tradition of buying up a galactic amount of CDs related to the bands performing:

Chiptune BonanzaChiptune Bonanza

As always, a festival with dozens of bands performing means that it’s an accounting nightmare for the poor folks running the sales table, so I send out my love to the 3 people it took with envelopes as I sat there going “this one”, “that one”, “oooh that one” and so on. It’s worth noting that this is basically the only remaining situation where I buy music in any sort of physical form, and even as I did it, friends of mine asked when they could borrow everything to rip it. It’s kind of not how things are done anymore, and I think of the entire endeavor as an irony-filled retro activity, like making your own cheese or binding a book. Sure, the result is satisfying and unique, but there’s so much else going on… regardless, I now have this massive collection in my house, ready to be pulled out at will. Did I mention I’m good for about seventeen minutes of chiptune music at a stretch?

2009 is shaping up to be another excellent year for both attendance and presentations; I’ve already got a dozen events I’m either attending and/or speaking at. I’m probably going to make a calendar page for just such an occasion. Expect that soon because I’m sure you can’t get enough of me.

While I have you here, this is the greatest machine I’ve seen this year. It is a part of my awakening to a whole range of neat projects and events that have come about due to the efforts of one Johannes Grenzfurthner. How much better my life has become due to him and others like him.

I also have a range of weblog entries coming, most of them bitter. But don’t be dismayed or concerned; it’s just that time of year when I have the urge to make a few unpleasant opinions known. It’s worked out so well for me in the past!

Bring it on.

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Never Shutting Up —

Photo of Jason Scott at ROFLcon by Scott Beale http://laughingsquid.com/

With the reboot of the ASCII weblog comes a chance, via these new tools dropped in my lap, to compile some information and lists I should have compiled quite some time ago. With the whole process so simple and enjoyable, I’ve got a rough version of one of the first of these, a list (with links) of the presentations I’ve given over the last 9 years. It’s located at https://ascii.textfiles.com/speaking and there’s a link it on the front page, but not everyone is browsing this site through an actual browser in today’s RSS world.

I hadn’t realized I was well past a couple dozen official speeches, with many of them recorded by myself and others. But I am, I have been, and so now I’m skimming past the years of my life trying to make sure I haven’t forgotten any. If you remember a talk I gave that I should list up there, let me know.

I’ll be making pages for press and I’m probably going to add a list on this page of my radio show appearances as well. If you haven’t heard some of these, go enjoy, oh, a day’s worth of audio from me.

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SOCKINGTON Tidings at ROFLCON-NY —

The creators of  ROFLcon just announced me as one of the speakers at a mini-event in New York City they’re calling ROFLthing-NY.  They already ran a post-ROFLcon event called “ROFLthing-SF” in San Francisco earlier this year and now they’re doing one at a fun little nightspot in January. (I’ve seen links where people go “Wow, when will they do it in SF” and guess what, kid, you missed it.) A Chicago event was planned but was cancelled/called on account of rain or something.

If you liked the Before the LOL presentation I did at ROFLcon (archive.org link, Youtube/Rocketboom summary) then you will like this one. If you didn’t, you probably won’t. Hint: It’s not 100% about the cat.

These ROFLkids, I don’t know how they do it, but they successfully whip up a frenzy about their stuff. I’m sure this thing will sell out in milliseconds. Luckily I’m sneaking in with a presentation.

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RADIOSHACKCATALOGS.COM —

A lot of people are telling me about radioshackcatalogs.com, which purports to be an archive of the yearly catalogs put out by Radio Shack, a chain of electronics stores (now not quite so much) dating back to 1921. (You can read an excellent history of this store chain on the official Radio Shack Corporation Site.) From the 1940s, Radio Shack has been putting out a catalog which has inspired generations of technology-minded people and which has grown and changed with the health and focus of the company behind it. No question about it; Radio Shack Catalogs are a definitely important chunk of computer (and electronics) history.

But like all good archivists, I browse the site and find a bunch of things that give me pause.

First of all, it has ads. And by “has ads” I mean like one would say that a bear “has fur”; it’s absolutely caked with them. I counted five ads on the front page, and two of those five are Google Ads where there are three more ads between them. So that’s either five or nine ads, determined by your charity. I have little charity.

Next, it has this pretty weird ownership thing. The top of the site says, and I quote,

This site not affiliated, nor associated with RadioShack Corporation in any way.  No copyright infringement is intended towards RadioShack Corporation.  Any reproduction, duplication, or distribution of the contents of this site is expressly prohibited.

Well, that’s interesting. So what is being said here is “I don’t own this stuff, and I know that, but still, you can’t have this stuff. P.S. Please click through the ads to help pay for this.” You know what I love? I love when people totally invent copyright law out of their heads. I fucking love that. It makes me warm, like sitting in a bowl of oatmeal.  The use of the Radio Shack Corporation logo as the FAVICON.ICO is also an excellent touch, since it inevitably will lead to confusion on the part of browsers, especially if they save it as a bookmark, as to whether or not this site is affiliated or associated with Radio Shack.

On to the content.

The site intends, if the index is any indication, to have catalogs from Radio Shack from 1939 to 2003, for a total of 64 catalogs, more or less.  As of this writing, forty of those catalogs are available, and oh, how they’re available!

To read them, you are given the choice of “large” or “small”, which is basically the resolution of the images being presented. “Large” appears to be decently large and even “small” appears to satisfy the needs of people idly flipping through, laughing at hair styles or remembering forgotten items they saved up allowances to purchase.

But here’s the best part. You have to read them in this crapped up, weird-ass, sound-effect-containing flash abortion. It has some nice features, but you don’t have much choice in the matter. Plus, you get an additional 3 or ads at the bottom of each set of pages, continually selling you stuff. If you don’t have flash, or want to read them another way, or want to take these freely-given-away catalogs and put them up somewhere else, the site is trying to stop you from doing so. After all, the site owner, Mike Haener, scanned them in, so they’re kinda “his”, right? And if he wants to dress them up and tart them out, well, who are we to stop him?

I think you know where this is going. Benj Edwards and I had this little disagreement a few years back, and after some admittedly-because-I-blindsided-him handwringing, his solution of watermarking his scanned old material by adding an easily-clipable-if-you-wanted-to-take-the-effort block to the side of the scan was an excellent compromise.  Benj has gone on to great things, moving from just being a kid with a stack of magazines to scan to a columnist and writer who refers to his scanned material while writing original essays and creating excellent, totally-his content that references this older material. Ah, how time flies.

Haener’s not there yet, and I know the feeling – you work so hard to scan stuff and then, well, some douche with a goatee comes along and just swipes your shit. YOUR SHIT, which slowly fell under your purview and control with each swipe of the scanner. How dare they even think of snagging that hard work. Been there, man. I mean, I didn’t stay there very long, but I’ve been there.

It’s a shame the JPEGs are not of the top quality, but I assume this was because you wanted to save bandwidth costs. Me, I’m all for just throwing up some TIFFs for download and bite down on the rubber ball when the visitors come. It hurts, but only a little.

Here’s the 1983 Sherborne Holiday Catalog. It took quite a bit of effort on my part to get the scanning just right, line up all the pages, blow them out to TIFF format, write scripts to convert them. But one might notice I make all of those TIFFs available for download, link right to the large-sized JPEGs so you can zoom in there but deep, and include a PDF I generated from the JPEGs if you want to experience the whole thing like a catalog. Not a watermark to be found, my little scanning friend. Not an ad on the page, unless you count the catalog itself. Note also, if you will, the paragraph at the top, where I actually spoke at length with the creator of this catalog, got his history, and discussed the context of this catalog with him. Great guy. Have you chatted with anyone at Radio Shack?

But let’s move on. It was pretty trivial to poke around and find where the original JPEGs of the catalogs were located. It was even more trivial to write a script to yank them down. And it was even a little fun for me to deal with where the webserver freaked out I was downloading stuff in such an unusual way and modify my script (RATSHACK.SH) to make sure it wasn’t acting suspicious. It was like chess, except I was alone and I think I ate a rook.

So allow me, if I may, the opportunity to present a mirror of RADIOSHACKCATALOGS. I’ve taken the liberty of making PDFs of everything as well as .ZIP files, in case people want to check it out. I’m sure I’ll be hearing from your legal team at some point in the future, but hey, we “copyfighters” have to bear the weight of our sacrifices, am I right?

Class is dismissed.

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