ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

A Few Thoughts on Conducting Interviews —

Just for the record, I’m just using this nice picture of Dan/Inky because it’s a representative resulting video screengrab. What I’m talking about doesn’t necessarily apply to his interview at all.

With the end of the shooting phase of GET LAMP, and combining it with my previous film, I have conducted something on the order of 300 interviews. I have interviewed people famous for something, infamous for something. People not famous for anything. People who are ashamed that this is all they were known for, people who have done nothing but define themselves by the subject being discussed. Some of my interviews have been overly friendly, while others have been bland or sad, and while none have been hostile or involuntary, I’ve had people say after the interview that they hate being interviewed and did it out of a sense of duty.

Through all this, I forged for myself techniques and observations in doing interviews, things I had to learn on the run and other things I sort of read about and kept in mind. Let me mention a few.

I am a horrible listener. Or, more accurately, I was. When I was very young I was rather a miserable person, and didn’t get along with most anybody. Why I didn’t move into arson I’ll never know, but I do know that when people showed an interest in me or at least a neutral regard, I talked to them much as a thirsty person sips water. Just the joy of being connected to someone via language meant I loved speaking at or near people when they’d let me, and this unfortunately grew to a habit of endless, withering monologues that could leave the most open-hearted and attentive person blindly pawing for a fork.

I recognized this enough to know that the biggest problem with doing a documentary with interviews in it would be to shut up. As a result, I started training. I had to actually train to shut up and listen. There’s a couple times in Michael Moore’s movies where you can hear him, off camera, absolutely poking someone with a verbal stick, having a conversation with them instead of conducting an interview. It can go the other way, too, with a person listening so much that there’s nothing for an interviewee to go on and they desperately lay out paragaph after meaningless paragraph, hoping some of this is usable. It can really go both ways, but I knew I was more of the conversation side of the coin than the silent side. I would ask people stuff about themselves, at parties, or hanging out, and then not say anything while they spoke. This was an effort. It was not how I was as a person at the time and it took months to try to undo some of that programming.

Oh, sure, I fail. In some of the interview recordings, I’m definitely having a conversation with the person or persons and not letting them go on. I got better, especially when I had to hear myself go on.

This said, there was definitely a case where I had to find myself speaking, and that’s when I was interviewing someone who really had no experience being asked things.

I pride myself on trying to find interview subjects that life hasn’t granted the platform to be heard. While some of the people I’ve interviewed can count the times they’ve been on camera by the hundred, others have me as their only video interview. While this might be because the person was a minor character, it was sometimes the case that nobody had really thought to ask, or no video documentary had ever been made that thought to include them.

And what would happen is they would speak, and then stop. And have nothing more to say. And I’d have traveled for some distance to see them, and a few extra minutes in any direction wouldn’t hurt, and so I would start to tell them a story. I have a lot of recordings of myself telling the same stories. But I wasn’t telling these stories because I needed to hear myself or because I thought it had to get on camera, but because I hoped the story would be a trigger. Let’s try one now.

When I was 18, I was really into They Might Be Giants, and I’d never seen them live, and here I was in college in Boston, at Emerson College, and I found out they were playing locally at the Paradise Rock Club. I decided I’d go, and I showed up so early, noon in fact, that there was nobody at the door. It was open, and I breezed right in, and found myself with the opening band doing a sound check. I’m walking around, marveling, when someone behind me asks where’s a good place to eat. It was John Linnell, one of the members of They Might Be Giants! I started to say something about fast food places, when John Flansburgh came by and said they found a place and off they went.

The story is true, but it’s also a huge pile of triggers. Boston, They Might Be Giants. The Paradise Rock Club. Emerson College, Sound Checks. Getting where you shouldn’t. Getting blown away by something. There’s all sorts of concepts and names in there, things that, if I was interviewing someone about Boston in the late 1980s, would set them off. THEY’d been to the Paradise back then. They remembered other clubs they’d been to. They remembered that time they were in the rain for an hour to get a glimpse of a band they loved. They might even remember the Rathskeller….

Stories help. It also helps to know who you’re interviewing.

Oh sure, you walk in there and you did the research and you know this is the guy who knows his stuff about playground equipment, and you’re going to interview him on that, but maybe, just maybe, a question about his favorite playground as a kid sets him off on an amazing emotional rant about what he loved about his early playschool days, an angle or side of his personality maybe never caught on film before. You have to be willing to switch on a dime – it’s not the facts you’re interviewing, it’s the person.

One last bit.

Sometimes you want to ask something that is going to change the tenor of the interview. Make it more uncomfortable. Work out a bad subject. Mention someone the person hates. To this day, I still turn off the camera and ask them how they feel about it, give them a minute or two to consider. This is a personal thing. I have a problem with getting into someone’s home or workplace and sucker-punching them. Sometimes, I feel like I am quite alone in that feeling.

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Through a new lens —

Let me tell you of a magic thing.

It’s called the letus, and let me explain how it works.

It’s this honked up little converter that attaches to the front of a video camera, preferably one running high definition, and allows you to click on 35 millimeter film lenses onto it. Sound simple enough. It’s also pretty odd looking:

And speaking of odd looking, if you think it looks like something you use to catch fish with when it’s sitting all by itself, you should see it when it’s attached to something like an actual camera, especially something relatively small like my beloved HV20:

THEN this thing looks like some sort of device to inseminate cows.

But here’s the deal: it makes stuff look absolutely awesome. Stunning, fantastic. Check out this thing, shot with a hi-def camera with a Letus on the end:


Natureland – Letus Extreme Film – HDTV from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

Now, for the bummer: the adapter is $4000. But $4000 is maybe $100 a day rental, or around there, and if you ask me, the little addition of this guy would make all the difference. Granted, this better be for the right shots because otherwise your k-razy komedy is going to look like it was shot on the eve of apocalypse or in the vineyards of France, but that’s what cinematography is, bub. Choose the right tool for the job. And this is a hell of a tool.

There’s this place called the Letus Lounge on Vimeo. I want to live in the Letus Lounge. I want to be the guy in the corner of the lounge sleeping on a scrounged pillow and using my jacket as a blanket. I want to be in that lounge when the next amazing-looking thing comes by, so I can be the first one there, smelling like burnt cookies and with my hair every which way. Try looking at a few, for example this one with stray cats or this dangerously close to mediocre music video.

But if you’re here because you like me for my archiving and history, then let me encourage you to check out one video shot using this adapter: a story about a man with what may be the largest private collection of records. Most people who do collecting don’t agree with a ton of what he says, and what he believes, and how he’s gone about things…. but I don’t think anybody can argue these aren’t some amazing sad shots of a pile of records.

I give you… the Archive.


The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

And because I’ve often let my opinion known on points of view via editing in documentaries, I feel like this guy is given a fair shake. He makes his statement, he shows what he thinks and what he wants, and he tells you why he loves these records so much. I don’t feel he was slighted, and people can take issue with what he says, but that’s the way it should be. So there.

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One Less Jason Scott —

I didn’t know Jason Scott, but I sure did see his name a lot.

With a common name like this one as my general name (it’s not my real one), it would be expected that I would bump up against other Jason Scotts. There’s Jason Scott Lee, the Hawaiian actor. There’s Jason Scott Roberts, who killed a cop. There’s Jason Scott the Delaware Liberal. There’s even a movie in 2009 (supposedly) called Hello, My Name is Jason Scott. I am not in this movie and have nothing to do with it.

And then there’s Jason Scott.

He was billed as the “Mentalist to the Stars”, and working out of Las Vegas, he was one of those guys doing amazing tricks involving guessing games, manipulating glass and metal and other nearby objects, and generally freaking people out. He had a show in Vegas at various times and had done a lot of different private parties for celebrities, including one that put him up in my area, Boston, where he performed for Sting.

He came home from that performance, said he wasn’t feeling well, went to bed, and died. He was 33.

Jason, it turns out, had taken some oxycotin, and then later had a drink. He might have thought he was fine, but it turns out that’s what killed him; the autopsy report just recently came out.

We never met, never exchanged any mail, and I never saw any of his shows when I was in Vegas. But his name was always popping up on my searches, always getting in the way of my ego surfing, a smiling bald face that said “ha ha, here I am”.

Sorry we didn’t get to meet, dude. You seemed pretty amazing.

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Another Blu-Ray Strike —

OK, I admit it. Nights get long down here at Jason Scott Ranch and I don’t like to just walk away from things for political/ethical reasons just because my politics and ethics fall along a different path than others might. So a combination of wanting to consider all my options and the fact that my DVD mastering software has a Blu-Ray option made me consider what would be involved in putting my movie out on the “winner” of the home media wars, Blu-Ray Disc.

I have all sorts of statements about disc formats and I was rooting for the other asshole, and without a doubt I am disappointed about Blu-Ray winning.

When I used DVD for the last movie, there was a certain spectrum of fuck I had to maneuver around and I like to think I did it well. For example, I removed the region condition (it’s region 0 or “universal” and hundreds of people outside of the US have thanked me for it), and I certainly didn’t pay for that lame-ass Macrovision whatever-the-hell protection they wanted money for. You could, trivially, pop the DVD set right into your player and have it work and you could definitely plug it into your computer and suck out all the files relevant to your interest and put it on your office network or media server or whatever the hell you wanted. It worked great for me (thanks for the bucks), it worked great for you, (thanks for the nice packaging and the respect). Even doing things in a DVD format, with “Copy Protection” sprayed on it, could be routed around for the damage it was

Now, understand something about this format, about the RIAA, and royalties. You might know this or might not.

First of all, there is an office in every duplication plant that you, standard peon, are probably going to use. This is an RIAA office. This isn’t an RIAA-FRIENDLY office, this is an RIAA office. When you send in your thing to be duplicated, they get a copy and they go over it for any obvious ownership violations. This is done. Always. Just so you know. Plants that don’t have this office, and there are likely a few, are basically targeted for raids. More often than not, these “plants” are backroom operations, not fully professional in the sense we might think of them. If you’re high-volume, you’ve got an RIAA office.

Second, you pay a royalty on every DVD that gets pressed, every DVD player that gets sold. This goes to a patent consortium, which gets paid for their work on the format and the basic design of DVDs. On top of that, you currently pay a royalty on every blank CD/DVD in a lot of places, that goes to the RIAA. OK? OK. You pay a royalty, back end or front end, on a lot of stuff you buy, that’s why people nearly blow their fingers off in garages around the world, to get the chance to charge a royalty on something they invented.

The DVD format mitigated the pain for a guy in 2005; just a few pennies a Disc went to this consortium of companies in the “patent pool”. So of my DVD Set that I made, I paid whatever the royalty was times three. The royalty is something like 3-4 cents a disc, so I was dinged for about 12 cents. OK, fine. Thanks, patent pool. Bear in mind, of course, I didn’t see this royalty, I only know about it because I know about such things; my duplication company included it in the costs of printing, because why bother me about “royalties”, which would confuse the average content creator? So this was a “back end” cost. I didn’t see it or feel it.

So let’s fast forward to Blu-Ray, the rat that won the rat fight. Companies that give you lots of information on the website are fun, so here’s a good page from PacificDisc.

Now, I don’t expect you to browse this thing closely, so let’s go right to the boner:


Advanced Access Content System (AACS) is required on all Blu-Ray projects, unless you are producing a ROM-only product. Any Blu-ray disc (BD-25 or BD-50) with any video content, be it for commercial or non-profit purposes must pay the AACS fees. The AACS fees, which are our true costs, without any mark-up, include: an AACS Media Key, AACS Content Certification and all AACS Order Processing Fees.

PacificDisc does not collect AACS Content Provider Fees. These are to be paid for by the content owner directly from AACS LA and proof of license is required before a project is started.

AACS is required on all Blu-ray discs and costs $1,585 per title plus $0.05/disc

No. Holy Jesus Muffin Baked In Hell’s Sweet Flame No.

There is no fucking way I am going to go through the pain of applying for a “license” to some asswipe centralized copy protection gestapo so that I can be issued my unique serial number, blowing $1,585 out the window for the privilege of this delicious turd which I then HAVE to use (HAVE to use, I must stress) on my disc so it “can’t be duplicated” by normal people but easily duplicated by anyone else and THEN pay another five cents PER DISC for all future copies of the disc using this key I didn’t want for copy protection I don’t want. On TOP of the royalty to the patent pool of the Blu-Ray Consortium per disc. No fucking way! I couldn’t make this clearer if I formed the words using a pile of dead offspring. This is an utter deal breaker, friends.

Think about that the next time you’re in the store considering buying your Blu-Ray player with tasty $30 Sony Royalty in it. Think how much money for all these products out there in the shelves is going to this crime family of copy protection licensing. Most smaller houses consider a 10,000 unit sale of something to be a wild success; it’s usually something like 5,000. Mine has been less than that. This would mean that thirty to fifty cents of every unit you buy is going into NOTHING. Into BREAKING THE DISC SO YOU “CAN’T COPY IT”.

Where’s the EFF in all this? I answer my own question: this situation is too far out there to really get involved with. A judge would point to online distribution and DVD-ROM and hard drives and point out that there’s no constriction of free speech here. They wouldn’t win. It’s too esoteric. But if Blu-Ray becomes “the” way you go to a table and buy a copy off of a stack next to an eager filmmaker, then it’s really the only easy transport mechanism for that direct-sell crowd. It’s sewed up. It’s owned. It’s bought and paid for and fuck you, little guy. Go blow it up on youtube and count your blessings we haven’t shut that shit down this week.

I push the papers back on the table. I get my jacket. I leave the room.

No fucking way am I doing Blu-Ray.

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The Age of Reason: An Apple II BBS — 

From: Gene Buckle
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Maniac IIe...

Telnet to The Age of Reason - 199.254.199.64.

Apple IIe running GBBS Pro v1.3j and the Land of Spur game from Dura Eurpos.
The _only_ of either one running on the whole fraking planet. :)

Gene Buckle’s one of my secret weapons in the fight to save BBS History – he’s midwifed more transactions that resulted in BBS Software than I can begin to count. And he’s thorough, too. The BBS Software Directory wouldn’t be the same without him.

You can really do this, telnet into this connection and try out an Apple II running GBBS, a convenient and informative look back. You can see the early versions of menu interfaces for forums, and maybe understand things a little more… if you weren’t there at the time.

For the uninitiated, here is the title page:

Connect at [2400] baud!
Ctrl-S Stop/Start  Spacebar to Exit
_
/ \
/   \  ___   ____                  The Age of Reason BBS
|  |  |/   \ / __ \                 Running GBBS Pro v1.3
|  _  |  |  |   ___|                2400 Baud, 8 Bits, 1 Stop
/__| |__\__  |\____/ _____           Proudly run by geneb
________| |/    \/  __/____  ____   ____   ___  ____  _ ____
/__________/   |  | /_|     \/ _  \ /    \ / __//    \| ' _  \
\____/ __/|  |   |  ___|   |  |    \   |  |  | \  |
/ /   |     /\____/ \___,_|\_  /\____/|__|  |__\
________/ /    |  |\ \__    ________/  /
/_________/    /__/  \___|  |__________/ -jmb


(*> Welcome to Age of Reason <*)

New users type "NEW"

Account Number
-->

Several notable aspects here, and as the years go by I feel like my explanations become more and more basic because examples of them are starting to disappear more and more with each passing month. Note how the title screen desperately needs a monospaced font (all the letters the same size). Without this, it’s a somewhat illegible jumble of slashes and underscores, missing the point entirely. Sometimes documents fall into my possession that seem to be messed up and corrupted files but which merely need the right formula, be it monospaced fonts, a specific system font, and a standard like MS-DOS’s ANSI or Atari’s ATASCII to make it all right.

Also note that the system requests an account number – you put in your number (like, say, 15) and THEN your password and only THEN does it start showing you your own name. It is not, in other words, your username, just your handle, your easy to remember reference for humans reading it, while the database record is all you get to work with as far as identity verification. Woe be to you if you logged onto 10-12 new BBSes in a night and forgot to write down your account numbers and which BBSes they went to!

A moment of reflection, please, on this little guy:

(*>

This collection characters on either side of the redundant “Welcome” line (which actually served you well if you connected from a problematic or incompatible system, or just couldn’t make out the slashes), are pure decoration, that little bit of humanity peeking out from the basic prompt. It’s not needed, per se, even less so than the use of slashes and underscores needed to be done, other than to make the name bigger. It’s a flourish. I live for those, and they achieve various levels of complication over the years. So, too, is the login prompt:

 -->

The characters are “dash dash greater than” but the arrow is as clear as day.

Let’s take a quick look at the menu:

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:     List of Supported Commands     :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:   <(B)>  Goto the Bulletin Boards  :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: (R)ead :  E -> Examine your stats  :
: (S)end :  F -> Feedback  to Sysop  :
:  mail  :  G -> General files menu  :
::::::::::  H -> Get detailed  help  :
: $ = News  O -> Other  BBS numbers  :
: I = Info  T -> Terminate  session  :
: C = Chat  U -> Get a user listing  :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: L -> Caller Log for  todays Calls  :
: Q -> Quick scan of bulletin boards :
: D -> Define  system display  parms :
: P -> Change / Update your password :
: V -> Vote on your  computer equipt :
: X -> Goto the  file  transfer area :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: SPUR -> Land of Spur Gateway       :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

There were no real “standards” for what menu letters should go to what function, hence “$” for “News” while “N” lays fallow. (Some software made this (N)ewscan.) “Messages” and “News” are different functions here, and most critical, to me, are the General Files.

Why? Well, this is one of those obscure trivia facts that is out there if you look for it but which a lot of people don’t care either way: the first textfiles that I think of as what would end up on textfiles.com come from the (G)eneral Files Menu, where the system operators would put funny, informative, or important textfiles up for people to read. The name “General Files” quickly shortened to “G-Files” or “G-Philes”, or even “Philes”, and that’s where that reference comes from. In today’s world, a lot of what the G-File functionality would stand for is done with “Sticky” messages, messages that float at the top of a topic board for people to read and post on as needed. Note how the “File Transfer Area” is a separate location completely, and with that situation, the chances of making sure people could read these important G-Files (when they were things like system rules and information) were that much decreased. The fact they later flourished into these hot tokens of shared chicanery was just an unexpected but enjoyable mutation. While people are there, why not throw them a few box plans or hacking tips?

The creator of GBBS, Greg Schaefer, has gone on to do many cool things, and he put a lot of excellent work back when he was a young kid working on this project. I interviewed him for the BBS Documentary and should probably get that interview up, as he was utterly shortchanged both in the film and the amount of time I actually had him on camera .

Great work bringing this up, Gene. I invite all students of the BBS era to remind themselves, in some small way, what it was like.

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Sockington’s Wild Success —

I mentioned Sockington’s twitter feed some time ago. And in the meantime, the little guy has become even more popular than you could imagine. At this point, over two thousand, seven hundred people pay attention to his adventures of food, patrolling, whimsical insanity, and cat toys.

From what I can tell, he has his own little fan base in action, all sharing the news of Socks the Cat to larger and larger groups of people. He has a long, long way to go to reaching anywhere near the top 100, but a little grey cat can dream. Mostly of tuna.

You go, little cat.

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GET LAMP Milestone Reached —

The question I am asked the most, on a nearly daily basis, regards GET LAMP, my text adventure documentary. How is it going? Is it out? Can I buy it? Why haven’t you finished it? Are you still doing it?

Understandable, because the website has remained mum for most of 2008. My fault. It’s one of those unavoidable things that came as a result of how I was going about the production, and should I end up doing another documentary in the future, one I will take steps to fix. For one thing, the place that would hold anything regarding the production in a sort of news/update situation was being basically pulled away by this weblog, but this weblog was hardly proper for general reading by people wanting to know about GET LAMP, what with the profanity and the hatred and the occasional meltdown. And when it came to getting a hold of people, the ball was basically well rolling by mid-2007, so anyone I wanted was being talked to in direct e-mails, so updates weren’t needed there. I’d hoped the photos page on the site would suffice for a “I’m working on it” but then we went from interview to clip phase, and with that, no obvious work shown on the site.

Ever deal with one of those places where it looks like they’re dead and upside down floating in the fishtank and then you ask how things are and you see they have a massive amount of work done? I hate those places. And I became one of those places.

So here we go.

I have finished going through all 120 hours of footage for useful clips.

This is the most dreary aspect of the way I do these documentaries. I listen to an interview and clip out any statements, poses, glances, or spoken ideas that I think might at all have to do with the final work. This can take forever, sometimes upwards of a week for a single interview, working a few hours a day. In the case of this particular setup I was using, the longest issue was having the system copy the newly created clip over to a clip folder, a process that took MUCH longer than I expected because high-definition footage is frigging huge. Ten minutes is four gigabytes. It was just honking large, and that took a lot of time.

I am very loose about what I consider possibly useful for the documentary. I keep a very open set of criteria; basically, you have to be either asking which way to look, or start complaining the mail didn’t get delivered today for me to not at least categorize it and clip it away for later regard.

I just checked my clip drives: I have 2,439 clips.

So the hardest, most drudgery-filled portion of the editing process is done. Having all these clips at my disposal allows me to start piecing together sequences and overlaps and putting together all the things being said. This is where I have fun, a lot of fun. I talked about this portion of time previously and in slightly more fruity language.

This begins now. I’m now working on putting the clips into folders (Infocom discussions need not be piled in the same directory as musings on the nature of puzzles or discussions by people with a doctorate in text adventures), and that’s probably another week or so, and then sequences in very rough form start happening. Eventually I’ll have stuff I’m showing to friends for feedback, and probably a sneak preview or two, and then working even more on the final product. More on that later.

Along with this, the site’s getting a complete do-over. That’ll be happening as well.

So rejoice, ever-present inquisitive types… progress is being made.

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The Amnesia Manuscript —

As mentioned in a rather recent weblog entry, a collector has gotten their hands on both original packaging and the manuscript for a game by the late Thomas Disch called “Amnesia“. This game, released in 1985, was a text adventure featuring a player waking up with no memory of who they are and the resulting puzzling out to solve a mystery.

True to their word, the collector, Stephane Racle, has scanned in the hundreds of pages (430+) of the manuscript and made them available. I’m mirroring it here.

Here is the PDF of the manuscript. (18 megabytes) (original link is here.)

Stephane Racle also did an amazing job scanning in PDFs of the first 100 issues of Computer Gaming World. I considered his work sterling in that regard and am sure this PDF represents an excellent version of the original paper. Stephane also OCR’d the PDF so it is possible to search it, although some notes are handwritten, and some pages are nearly unreadable generally. But you’ll get the idea.

To be clear: this is not a novel, this is not a script in the sense most people think of a play or a shooting script. This is a specification outline for an interactive fiction, where the descriptions Disch works in are meant to be manipulated by the player in the process of exploring a world. It is informative and interesting to see a writer grappling with the form, trying out things to say, giving unusual linguistic touches to descriptions, and generally making his way through the core ideas he’s trying to get across. The term most often used for this is pseudo-code. An example in the script is (If response to 11> is TAKE BLANKET or WEAR BLANKET:], i.e. what the game should print as a description for a blanket in a given room. Disch referred to this decision junctions as nodes, other authors grappled with the terms in their own way.

If you’re hard-pressed to want to read “writing”, he definitely has full-blown paragraphs from this manuscript. Some of this stuff never made it into the final game (space limitations would have demanded it), so it’s stuff that may or may not exist anywhere else but in this scan. For example:

“You spend the next hour preparing to face death and debating with yourself the pros and cons of capital punishment. If you could be sure you’d killed a guard while trying to escape from this prison, you’d feel less
of two minds. Since you’re not sure, you feel it isn’t really fair to be executed. How much more humane, you
think, to induce amnesia like your own. instead of condemning men to death. On the other hand, given a choice
between a quick and painless death and a lifetime of dying slowly here in Revoltillo…”

A number of authors tended to work in this sort of pseudo-code. Robert Pinsky did when he worked in Mindwheel, Douglas Adams definitely handed his ideas over to Steve Meretzky for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Marc Blank/Mike Berlyn contributed a spec script for Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. (Some authors, of course, never went near the game in any fashion, just having an agent license the rights to a company to build a game around.)

A great thank-you to Stephane for being so generous with his talent and windfall.

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An End to my Broadcast Day —

Somewhere earlier this year I noticed I wasn’t watching much television.

Between editing my documentary and writing weblog entries and job and archiving and all the rest, the amount of time I’d want to spend watching television was reduced greatly, and mostly supplanted with video games. A quick desktop game or a consistent thrashing about on Halo and all that “dead time” my brain needed would be gone and I’d be back to the various projects that needed my attention.

Specifically, I calculated out how much television, and by television I mean “signals through my satellite dish to my television in my living room”, I had actually watched in the past twelve months. I figured out that it was approximately seven minutes, the amount of time switching from my Nintendo Wii over to my XBox, where my television would flip through the input for the satellite box and I’d sit there for 5 seconds to figure out what was there, note it was probably a cooking show, and keep going onto the other box. (From the Xbox to the Nintendo Wii, I didn’t see that input at all). $600 for seven minutes of television is not in any way a bargain.

So it’s cancelled. The box is now wrapped up, and more sadly, the TiVO has been disconnected.

I bought one of the first TiVos and I loved that thing; without a doubt my television watching habits, already on life support, got a nice vitamin shot with TiVo back eight years ago, and probably ensured I’d watched a lot more than I probably would have over the last decade or so. The days of my sitting in front of the box hopefully waiting for the next top of the hour to see what miserable rabbit droppings I’d cull from dozens of channels were over, and TiVO could at least change the paradigm to “TV E-mail”, where I’d have a machine collect what might be good for me, and then I’d watch what particularly attracted me. Sometimes I’d get behind on my TV E-mail and I was doing what we’re all doing a lot more of, sitting down with a massive “to do” pile and going through it somewhat bemusedly, turning the process into relative drudgery. But compared to the previous situation, this drudgery was content-filled indeed… it was just that a lot of the content was pure sugar, and how much pure sugar can you sustain?

My laptop came with, of all things, a digital broadcast antenna and TV card, so if life really called for it, I could whip out the laptop and watch stuff, in high definition even, if we had some sort of situation of a critical television moment; but there’s just not a whole lot of those anymore, requiring my immediate live attention to what is about to unfold. At that point, I’d probably just walk down to a nearby bar and watch it there, because if we’re all going to die, I might as well start actually drinking.

Television was awesome to have in my early years, when I was a lonely pre-teen. I picked up thousands of bits of trivia, tons of movie references, masses of jokes, lots of fun ideas. I’ve been mining what I learned from television for many years, and have gone back in the modern era, when we now have quantized all this garbage, and found out why I liked or didn’t like something, or what those people went on to do in their careers. It’s been a lot of fun.

But time away from the television started happening after college, supplanted by Internet tomfoolery, and then led to more and more time away as I simply couldn’t afford either cable television or a better TV itself; a little black-and-white sufficed for a good number of years. I got back into TV watching with increased salary, and now have a pretty massive set. But it never really came back, that day in and day out watching that got me through the early years.

This isn’t to say I don’t watch television shows. Far from it – I have a stable of shows I make it a point of watching when I can, be they Burn Notice or the easily digestible Family Guy, or House, and maybe a couple others. But these are downloaded or bought, single-handful files grabbed as I would grab anything else from the internet or local stores. They’re not something I arrange myself and my life for the privilege and seeing in a theater-like setting or a special place in my home – they’re something happening nearby, in a window, while I’m otherwise thinking. And I wasn’t getting them from the satellite anymore.

Do not expect me to become one of those dreary anti-television types, those people who go out of their way to brag how they don’t watch television, how poor it is for thinking folks, how little they think of those watching it. I consider this sort of superiority complex a way for boring people to seem like they’re boring for a reason. Television fucking ruled. I still watch television shows, just not television.

But this simple disconnection, it’s a new phase in my life. I guess the loss of a land line in my house a couple years ago was another. I’m living a different way than I ever lived before. I’m different. I’m changing. I bet it’s for the best.

3 Comments

Earning their $9.95 a Month — 

Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 17:07:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dan Strawser 
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Website Request

Hi Jason,

My name is Daniel Strawser from Reputation Defender Inc.  I am writing you
representing my client, Christoph Vaessen.  He has asked us to contact you
and politely inquire whether it were possible to remove his name from a
certain text file on your website.  This text file can be found at the

http://www.textfiles.com/sex/abbs9302.txt

In this context, we would like to introduce ourselves. Our company,
Reputation Defender Inc., has made it its goal to watch over our clients'
good names on the Internet.

While Christoph appreciates your effort to achive text files and document
a unique period of computer history, he would prefer if his name were not
publicly associated with this document.  Additionally, the file appears on
search engines and he fears that it may affect him professionally.

Would you be willing to remove Christoph's name for us?  It would mean
very much to him and to us.

We would like to thank you for your understanding and for your time.

Please let us know if you have made steps toward the removal of the
information from the above mentioned website. You can also send any
questions that you might have to dstrawser@reputationdefender.com.

Thank you,
Daniel Strawser
Reputation Defender Service Team


--
Daniel Strawser
Reputation Defender, Inc.

This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the
individual(s) named. If you are not the named addressee, you are hereby
notified that disclosing, copying, distributing or taking any action in
reliance on the contents of this e-mail is strictly prohibited.  Please
notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have  received this e-mail
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12 Comments