ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Amnesia, Forgotten and Remembered —

Within the context of text adventure history, this is relatively big news.

From: Stephane Racle
Subject: Amnesia

Not sure if anyone here is a fan of "Amnesia", the text adventure that
was written by Thomas M. Disch and released by Electronic Arts in the
mid-1980s, but I recently acquired a number of interesting items related
to the game. Apparently, the game was originally supposed to be released
by book publisher Harper & Row, but that was cancelled - and as a result
the game was picked up by Electronic Arts. The package I got includes
the folders (bi-fold style) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 versions,
complete with a couple of trinkets. No disks, I'm told that there never
was one. There's also proofs of the folders, and a complete manuscript.
Much of the writing never made it to the game due to space
considerations, so it should be an interesting read.

Enjoy!

Stephane

The artwork is completely different from what ended up going out there. The layout is completely different, the photo of Disch is completely different. In other words, this is what was originally intended for this project before it was sold to a different entity, who redid the work in their image.

The real amazing thing, however, is the manuscript:

The fact that there exists a complete version of a work written by Disch means that people essentially have a new book by him. That’s quite a find.

Collectors find this stuff all the time, things that you didn’t know were amazing or wanted until other people hear of them. This particular find, while not overly pressing to my own text adventure documentary project, is still great news to hear. Disch’s end, alone and sad, should not take away from his work so long ago, and to suddenly find work of his from 20 years ago is just wonderful. I know work will now happen to make this additional insight into the man available more generally.

Treasures abound in this world, waiting.

Update: The manuscript is now available for browsing.

2 Comments

I’ll be Over Here, Thanks —

Here’s a scenario I find myself halfway through on a weekly basis.

Someone writes something stupid in their weblog. Specifically, someone writes something stupid that I think I have a more informed opinion on, or which causes me to want to point out the person has said something stupid, or which, in their usual hailstorm of stupid, a particularly memorable baseball-sized hailstone of stupid has come down.

The first question that might come to mind is why do you read the weblogs of stupid people, and the answer is usually two-fold: either this person or site occasionally dredges up a factoid or link I’d otherwise not hear of, or I’ve convinced myself that exposing myself to this person on a regular basis will keep my own degrading intelligence in check. The mental equivalent, in other words, of fiber.

Regardless, Mr. Stupid will post something in which he lays out some cataclysmic whopper, some mental hurdle that he fails to clear and leaves himself splayed out on the tartan. Particularly egregious to my own interests are complete misrepresentations of historical events, swapped names, or snickering and derisive commentary belying a canine ignorance of what they’re talking about. At this point, I feel like I must act, in that same impulse of seeing a tipped-over trash can in front of you that you know the wind will eventually drive out into the street. You will receive no personal benefit, the result is statistically meaningless, but you know in your heart there’s a tiny, tiny chance that you can avert some sort of disaster. So I wish to comment.

Most weblogs, with almost no exception, have a facility for leaving commentary on the page. There’s some vague differences in structure (some sites put the comments on a different page, others put them right there, others make you go to a forum to discuss the current stories), but the general template is the same: put in your name, your “URL”, and blart out some text into this little square until you get tired, then press submit. There’s a sad sort of blandness to the endeavor, a reflection of a step back from interacting with text manipulation, when no such thing need be the case. This incentive to go all-out in commenting leads to only the most driven and single-minded of writers adding thoughts this way. Or, even more likely, you end up putting a cramped set of words together and hitting “submit” when you exceed 120 characters.

So an element of “Salutations, Fucknut” in the responses should perhaps be expected. This is why it probably ISN’T an awesome idea to have the comments on the same page as the essay/entry – the layout says “I have spent some time composing my thoughts, and now you can get equal billing for 30 seconds of distracted type-blather”. But the “What Ho, Moron” should be particularly expected when you constantly say stupid things.

To group “bloggers” together is to group “writers” or “illustrators” together. This is a wide, massive field, with a lot of different approaches to a skill or art among them. The methods by which one weblog writer might approach his stories might sort of crawl near the “journalistic” altar, while others are content to say one ill-wrought sentence and then a 4 paragraph cut-and-paste from an actual informational source. I mean, you can get all these people around a table at a restaurant but I don’t know how scintillating the conversation will be, or more accurately how soon it will be before the group turns into a bunch of subgroups, each chatting about something a little more relevant to them than “I sure love my spell checker”.

So let’s go back to the situation that I’m commenting on. When I say someone has said something stupid in their weblog, I mean that they’ve composed an actual set of paragraphs on a subject, a withering attack or mealy-mouthed rant about a subject, and have done so with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other words, they’ve at least got the accessible tools at their side to compose an idea and bring it to fruition to their audience – it’s just that their idea is stupid.

And now I wish to comment on it. I do. If reading my weblog has been any indication for you, I am not going to say nice things. I am probably going to start out unnecessarily strong, a fist pounding the table and making your nice china rattle a bit, bringing all surrounding conversation to a halt. I am going to, in other words, resist the urge to temper my criticism in sugar and chocolate in the hopes you will mistake it for a compliment because you are fucking wrong, motherfucker.

Anyway. So most sites range from posting your comment immediately to “holding your comment for moderation”, which in many cases means you have a URL in the message body (triggering a spam mechanism), or that somebody’s had so many spammers happen in their comments that they end up holding everything for moderation. OK, I can live with that.

But 90 percent of the time, easily 90 percent, my comment never makes it up.

So why is that? Well, most people would say, “of course, you were too hostile”. As if the person should, on the basis of the tone of the message, immediately delete it and never look back. As if a person says “give me your comments” and doesn’t, in fact, mean “give me your comments”. And wait for it, you know what this means: it means the comments are being filtered for people agreeing with the writer, which means that they are now artificially strengthening their own position with the sucralose of dainty oh-you-are-so-smart platitudes.

This is awful. It’s false advertising, it’s inaccurate. Some sites have little precious disclaimers like “please keep it civil” which, as far as I’m concerned means that I refrain from implying I’m of a mind to set their porch on fire. But every person has their own definition of “civil” and many of them mean “to my ideas”. In other words, don’t beat down what I just said with logic or clear cut talk; tell me how tasty these little treats I am laying out for you are, because I am not being directly paid for this.

A trope which sometimes comes out is that you are on their space and you will follow things according to their rules – and this takes me back. In the BBS Documentary I cover the sysops who would say “You are in my house and my computer and you will follow the rules as if you are in my home”. This holds, to me, even less of an already-flimsy grasp on reality when you realize these places aren’t even hosted in people’s homes any more. Well, except mine.. ascii.textfiles.com is actually located in my own basement. Yeah, that’s right, your calls are coming from inside my house.

Do I drink my own lemonade? Yes I do. Comments come into my weblog that are just vicious, personal attacks. I put them up. All of them. I wrote it, they wrote back, there we go. A harkening back to the goatse article of January of 2007 provides a fall harvest of absolutely terrifying logical positions, suitable for a gang rape. With popularity of the article came the greater and greater onslaughts of disinterested parties stepping up to the microphone to tell me I was everything from a babyeater to a pornographer to some sort of bran muffin. But they’re all up there. They speak for themselves, pro or con.

The solution, really, is not to comment at all on their weblogs. The best thing is to take the germ of the idea that Moron put on his site, link to it, and then compose a blood-on-the-walls attack, a direct point-by-point Jesus-Christ-you-should-have-been-aborted-in-the-twentieth-trimester no-holds-barred murder spree of their brain-surgery-with-toothpicks intellectual enterprise. In this way you control the floor, you are not subject to their whims of what gets shown and what does not get shown. This is an effective situation indeed.

But it means that someone coming to the original essay, the original entry in the weblog, will see just the pontificating dumbass and his slathering minions, and have no idea that someone, somewhere else, probably saw the same flaws they do. The incentive to search around to find responses to this entry will never be as great as the situation of seeing the dumbness and maybe commenting too. It is, in other words, a black hole of thought, with a lint trap attached at the mouth to look for sychophants.

A tragedy, really, that the network that allows all these ideas to share space is immediately split off into tiny whorls of me-too, you’re-right, I-agree. What a shame.

8 Comments

Wallflowers Video Now Available —

The video I shot for MC Frontalot, “Wallflowers”, became available.

Here’s the official YouTube version ( I suggest clicking this link to see it):

And here’s a Hi-Def Vimeo Version:



MC Frontalot: “Wallflowers” from Jason Scott on Vimeo

I already said a bit about the production of this video.

Frontalot is running a contest to show me up. Do it, I dare you, I double dog dare you. Discussions on the entries (and my own) are happening over on this thread.

And, of course, all this is in support of the Final Boss album which Frontalot is offering for sale and which is released on November 4th. That said, when you buy it, you get immediate access to digital downloads of the music tracks. Pretty neat. And trust me, it’s a good album. If you like Frontalot, you’ll love this album, which is a progression of instrumental and writing quality for him. I personally recommend it; I may need to buy another because I’m wearing the first out in my car.

Oh, and I successfully resisted calling this entry full frontal, so I guess I still have some self control in these matters.

1 Comment

The Pain of the Field Major —

Since the time I talked about it, I have ascended in level from Captain to Major in Halo 3. This didn’t happen immediately after the weblog entry, but a few weeks later. It came as the result of a particularly involved process of just jamming over and over into games until I won.

In one fell swoop, I stopped being a Staff Captain and became a Major Grade 3.

It was such a minor change from any point of view, such a meaningless difference. But the difference in treatment was galactic. Games were devoid of bruising, useless insults from people ranging in age from tot to toker. My pre-game “chat” sessions weren’t run-downs of my statistics and demands to stop playing this game. Members of my own team would stop explaining to me, in prelude to the actual game, how much I, as a person, sucked. Like leaving an abusive relationship behind, the relative tranquility of life with a “normal” rank was palpable. My urge to choke the living fuck out of nearly every person I was “playing” with subsided like a polluted tide. The game was a game again. Occasionally, in fact, children would bless my name, discovering that a major was among their ranks and perhaps this time their usual losses would be contained. It was a good time.

And let me be clear; I don’t mean the insults went away, just that they greatly diminished. Very occasionally, maybe once every fifty or sixty games, I would have someone glance at my numerical statistics, and in a prototype for their later years as an obese bookie, proceed to ramble down in what exact ways I sucked. But this sort of person was more like the unexpected screaming panhandler, who has decided to just go for the gusto in the hope that a passerby will give them a twenty dollar bill instead of the usual quarter. You chalk it up to the variety of living and move on. So I considered this quite acceptable.

Of course, this blissful period didn’t last long. My collection of experience points in the game, combined with this rank, meant that it would be only a matter of time before I was given another rank that had gold bars.

And that rank is Field Major.

Obviously, the thing is recognizable as quickly as the Staff Captain was: it’s the gold bars. People see it and know immediately you’re of a class, a class they shouldn’t care about or can openly disdain.

Immediately, I received the same cutting remarks, profanity, and insults that came with the Staff Captain ranking. This was not based on my playing ability, merely on the appearance of this rank. I would ballpark guess that the abuse is ever so slightly diminished, since less people have rankings at this level than below, but since the game tends to throw people of similar rank together, my “team” and the opposite team pretty much know what’s up and start laying in.

Am I whining? Perhaps. What I really am is aghast. Aghast that this situation exists, aghast at the nature of the attacks, aghast that I find myself disgusted with playing the game many nights as team after team ends up telling me how worthless a person I am for having the rank I do, peppered with ironic statements like “get a life” and “go find something better to do”.

As a side note, there’s some interesting reactions when I mention I’m 38. A sizable portion of the players will tell me I’m too old to be playing, in various levels of coherency. They’re shocked I own a house, have a job, and play this game. I am told that I should be doing other things, lest I be a “loser”. This visualization of computer/console games as child-like, play for the youngest in society, is particularly interesting considering how much of the game I spend staring through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle, trying to turn someone’s skull into a wall mural.

The return of the insults and verbal attacks has brought it all back, this socially-retarded vibe that I have had to deal with in this realm since the first time I brought this XBOX into my home. Games as simple as Uno that have a chat aspect result in a panoramic display of asshatery, an in-my-face demonstration, from a consistently rotating cast of characters, just what the true meaning of the words stupid kids arises from.

Tycho and Gabe paint this world in their conventions and website, this idea that gamers are a community or a club or at the very least a sort of person who has certain elements, and when you bring them together, the best of their elements shine through. Maybe in the course of a physically-based assemblage we see less of this side of things, less of this mercenary and self-centered behavior, but I honestly start to think it’s the exception and not the rule.

This situation reminds me of how much I hated people when I was younger, hated their delight at attacking the different, of reactionary burblings from morons unfamiliar with a need to shave. A hatred of proto-adults delighting in how little they know, how poorly they can speak, how inadequate their single handful of vocabulary is. I spend a lot of my time doing what might be called generous work for many folks online, but experiences like this make me consider how few of my audience I might actually like in extended conversation, how little they would have to offer me as associates, how better off I am that I haven’t met them. Given the choice, I would make no effort to hold the elevator door open for them, or stop the subway car from closing up and moving on, leaving them in the rain.

Sartre was right. And I am positive he’d have laughed into his headset all the while.

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An Interesting Mentor Linkage —

OK, so I’ve talked about him before, but Pete Chvany, who was one of my great mentors in my formally-educated years, has had an enormous about of influence on me and a lot of how I look at life and recording it. I was so enamored of him as a teacher that I actually took a course of his twice, completely confusing the registrar, and as I expected the second time around was just as fulfilling and enjoyable and educational as the first time.

The screenshots from above are from a currently-unfinished-but-any-month-now student project I did in college, where Pete played a parody of a film professor. I thought it was great, and I love these shots. This is circa 1992.

It may seem almost laughable now, but there was a specific attitude related to shooting a film project on video. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars shooting on 16mm or 35mm film stock, I chose to do my (not approved by the college) final project on 1/2″ U-Matic tape, which produced a perfectly fine image, even if it might seem pretty simple now. We lit it like film and I think the shots that Scott Rosann and I set up together as as pretty as anything I’ve done.

Pete, like I said, had an enormous influence on me. His way of looking at life transcended specific mediums for film transfer or video usage; as my college moved away from sprockets-and-tape filmmaking to online video editing and digital media, he shifted painlessly. He still works at the college as one of the techs and managers of the video editing environment. Whereas another teacher might put up their nose and move onto pure theory and writing, eschewing this dreaded use of electronics in lieu of the organic frame, Pete gets his hands dirty doing what it takes to help real projects come alive. I am sure there are hundreds of video projects improved by his proximity to students desperately trying to finish their vision.

Pete didn’t talk about his own history in a very overarching sense – he mentioned he’d worked professionally doing films, but primarily in doing what he called “industrial films”, films purchased by companies to show products or promote ideas, that they would generally show either internally or to very specific audiences. At some point he brought in a film he had shot years previously showing the sorting mechanism of a copier – he said it was covered by an NDA, and discussed some of the issues he had getting a functioning camera that close to a massive piece of hardware. It was quite entertaining. But generally, this was not work you were going to see on the IMDB anytime soon.

One of the co-founders of the interactive fiction compay Infocom was a man named JCR Licklider, who was a faculty member of MIT and who did absolutely groundbreaking work the areas of programming, networks and general computing. He was a board member and co-owner, and while he didn’t do a whole lot on the coding side, he was definitely in the mix in the early days of the company. Looking for footage of him, I happened upon a documentary in my own collection, which I’d picked up when it zipped around online a while ago:

It’s called “Computer Networks – The Heralds of Resource Sharing” and it’s directed by by old mentor, Pete Chvany. Created towards the early part of his career, this documentary covers a lot of the reasoning behind wanting to use networks between computers – the saved resources, the speed, the use of routing to ensure the best connection to what you need at any given time. It appears to be shot in 16 millimeter, and has a variety of outside, inside, hand-held and illustrated shots.

The subjects themselves put the word “dry” out to pasture, replacing it with “vacuum”. But this is the vacuum of getting unbelievably brilliant people, people whose work we all depend on now, to discuss as best they can the motivation of their work. These aren’t website CEOs proudly mentioning how they can serve ads to a greater audience than anyone else and jump-starting “community” out of a javascript abortion – these guys are the real deal.

It’s a lot of fun for me, personally, to watch this film. The subject (computers) ranges with what I do documentaries on. The problems that Pete and crew must have dealt with must have been enormous – sound, lighting, all done completely differently than how I deal with them (lights for me weight less than a couple pounds – that couldn’t have been the case in 1972). I hit the tail end of actual sprockets-and-glue film and Pete definitely taught the processes we would have had to deal with, should I have continued along that line.

But more than that, there’s a hundred little details in how the shots are set up, the many angles, the combination of “show me” and “tell me”. What must have been days and days of arranging the rooms, the locations, and accessing all manner of machinery. It’s great to watch him in action, 16 years before I knew of him, and when I was 2 years old.

I guess that’s the best part of being involved in media – I can call up a moment 35 years in the past as if it just happened, and enjoy a view I’d never have been granted before.

3 Comments

Steve Meretzky Speaking at MIT — 

Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 18:57:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nick Montfort
Subject: [Purple-Blurb] Steve Meretzky on Monday (in Stata, not our usual location)

STEVE MERETZKY
Monday (Oct 6) at 6pm
32-141

Award-studded "game god"* Steve Meretzky will speak on Monday (Oct 6) at
6pm in the Stata Center, 32-141.

Steve Meretzky's first job in computer gaming was at the Cambridge company
Infocom, which was the leading interactive fiction developer. Meretzky
became the company's most prolific author, writing Planetfall, A Mind
Forever Voyaging, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos and co-authoring The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Douglas Adams.

Meretzky has since worked at Legend Entertainment, Boffo Games (which he
co-founded), and WorldWinner. He is currently at Blue Fang Games.

Meretzky won the 2008 Game Design Challenge at GDC and recently starred in
the MC Frontalot video "It Is Pitch Dark."

Meretzky will speak, have a public conversation with Purple Blurb host
Nick Montfort, and then take questions from the audience. The event is
free and open to the public. To learn more about the Purple Blurb series of
which this talk is a part, see: http://nickm.com/if/purple_blurb

* According to the magazine PC Gamer.

If you live within 50-100 miles of Cambridge, Massachusetts, you might want to consider a road trip that evening.

2 Comments

Say What Again —

It took me years to figure this out, so enjoy the hard-won information.

There’s been no small amount of study in the area of how people perceive the world. More specifically, there’s been rather involved research in how people ingest information or how they “learn”. A standardized “here’s a room with a person in front and yammer yammer yammer write write write oh boy a test” works for a large number of people in some predictable fashion and that continues to be dominant, but anybody who’s done research in this field tends to acknowledge that some people are different in how they might learn a given subject, and to what depth they’d take in what was being presented.

There’s all sorts of stop-gap handling of this in educational systems, ranging from specialized tutoring and learning materials, down to “let’s ignore bo-tard until he goes away”. There’s also alternative learning systems and thoughts on better ways to present subjects so the student, young or old, can not just rote-recite a subject, but fundamentally understand the principles involved.

So one of the things that’s come out of all this study is the theory that people actually learn better based on different input methods – some handle physical demonstrations, some read better, others listen better. While it’s good to have skill sets that encompass all these methods, you tend to learn best through a specific method.

Some time ago, I realized I have real trouble listening.

Reading, there’s no problem there. If you write me something, I can refer to it, deal with the information, process it. But say something to me, and you might very well be talking down a hole. I have spent some time trying to improve this, because I’m a conversational person, but the fact is, there’s a good chance that I will walk away with very few pieces of a spoken set of instructions. I’m good for about 3-4 facts. Give it to me in a written form, and I’ll be able to nail most of it for the next time I’m asked to recount it.

In fact, I’m perhaps too good at collating incoming information that I can convert to written form; I just had a conversation with a couple friends over lunch in which I was just blowing out trivia fact after trivia fact based on a general “what do you know of this” question. When the response was to a specific subset of those facts, I could keep going, focusing on the trivia facts that fit under that constricted software. It’s effortless for me.

But if someone asks me “what did I just say” to something they just said, I dodge and weave and parry and can’t quite recall it. My brain has a blind spot to it.

For what it’s worth, it’s not interpersonal; I seem to have the same issues with colors, and can’t at all remember them unless I can relate it to something or write it down. So right now I couldn’t tell you the color of a single house that isn’t my own, and I can only tell you the color of my house because I did some investigation into having it painted a new color – so I needed to know the old one in some way.

I suspect this is why I’ve always enjoyed sorting text and files – they’re static sets of written information, and I can recall vast amounts of their contents in classifying orgies that last for weeks on end. I enjoy it as much as anything else, and I know for others it’s horrible drudgery. Not so over here.

Anyway, once I realized this, once I started asking people to write me things like instructions or directions or lists of facts, a weight of sadness fell off of my shoulders. I could recall what people were up to, what they wanted, what was left to do. I was engaged and happy.

I wonder how many people are wandering around, miserable, without knowing why their attempts to learn don’t stick.

5 Comments

Not a Bummer! —

Jason was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to textfiles.com, which did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.

Photo by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid

Anyway.

Yes, I’m back from Europe. So much great stuff, so much to talk about. Let me quickly thank Johannes Grenzfurthner, Franky Ablinger, and Gunther Friesinger of Monochrom, for bringing me over to Vienna and putting up with me, giving me incredible times and tours, and for a hundred other good deeds. Obviously, there are a dozen other folks to thank as well, and I shall do my best in coming days.

Remember: If a wild-eyed Austrian in a wide hat invites you to Vienna, say yes.

1 Comment

Bummer! —

So, I’m about to board a flight to Frankfurt, onward to Vienna, and then doing a bit of travelling and coming back in about 11 days. I will enjoy my birthday during the trip, and basically be doing a bunch of stuff I never have before. Therefore, there’s all sorts of chances I will die.

Oh, this isn’t LIKELY, or even PERIPHERALLY LIKELY, but one thing that annoys me are weblogs where the guy’s last weblog entry is boring and mundane and then everyone’s comments after seem silly. So here, here’s my “hey, guys, life is going great and I’m off to do cool new things” message, ready for your postings.

Some helpful requests:

– Don’t throw out your old history, find someone to give it to.
– Someone should finish my movie.
– I loved all of you, even the ones I hated.
– I will need a tiger team of 6-12 people to be my porn buddy.
– Socks is in good hands.
– Hooray for the BBS!

Seriously, see you soon.

8 Comments

The IIe Underground —

I can’t even begin to explain how wonderful this site is. Yes, it’s in French. Yes it’s a vaguely weird URL to refer to, lacking the panache of a appleunderground.org or other clever domain-based knick-knack.

But what work! What amazing effort! What an astounding collection of Apple II lore, stories, screens, descriptions, documentation, textfiles! Ce Magnifique!, Deckard has assembled such a comprehensive collection of French cracking artifacts that I am at a loss on even how to comment on it! So large is its realm that it leaks into rather amazing collections of US-based groups as well, all presented in a faux- vintage style.

As I recently quipped, I bemoan the single-link weblog entry, but to write more would in some way attempt to defect credit from Deckard’s years of work. Enjoy this site to my highest recommendation.

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