ASCII by Jason Scott

Greetings and hello. As you’ve no doubt recognized, with these summer months have come a slowdown of weblog entries. While I had time, scant time, to write some helpful and/or entertaining entries on a daily or near-daily basis, I really am just too busy to do that right now, and I absolutely refuse to fall in with the “list of links with pithy one-liners” crowd, choosing instead to just focus on the weblog’s style of essays and considerations. A few short items have come to my attention, so I’ll combine them all today.

Benjamin’s Hot Button

A very large “Buzz” was generated recently by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is a movie retelling of an F. Scott Fitzgerald tale. The story is simple; a man is born at 70 years old and slowly grows younger as time passes, experiencing life in reverse. From this, all sorts of insights into the human condition are yielded. I am delighted to experience from this that there are people after my own heart, who are inspired to do things above and beyond with the original material. The trailer for the movie is in high definition and sadly way too revealing of things that will be of relative interest to someone expecting dramatic reveal. But that aside, there’s a more meta-interesting issue with this whole situation:

The movie is to be released at Christmas.

It’s the middle of June. This means that the movie is being promoted a full six months before release. Six months is a very long time; Yahoo may not still be an independent company by then; a lot of celebrities will have died; we may be in financial problems as a nation; we will know who the next president is. This is, in other words, a rather long time. If the item in question were a game or product of that ilk, then one could see months of ramped-up anticipation. But it seems like, more and more, it borders on ludicrous to announce and provide material for a 2 hour production a full half-year before anyone can purchase it, and months beyond that (though not many) to acquire a home version.

I am aware of, and probably coherent of, more than many of how Hollywood works and especially how marketing works within the Hollywood machine, and especially how a lot of what you encounter via Hollywood is elaborate in both execution and planning. Nothing is left to chance, truly and honestly. Not a jot or a tittle. So some set of folks, who do some amount of decisions for people who have an awful lot of money and wish to make it grow, believe that six months of anticipation or announcement is necessary for the film. These are not dumb people and they are certainly not inflexible in game plan; if you’ve ever walked into a video store and seen a movie you’ve never heard of starring people you have, and it’s just come out, that was on purpose. Similarly, it is probable that you know there was a new Indiana Jones movie that came out this year and very unlikely you didn’t know. So why think that six months of warning is needed?

One possibility might be the salary of Brad Pitt, the star and currently, like it or not, on the top of the A list for recognition, “brand awareness” and bankability. His asking price is often quoted in the $20 million to $30 million dollar range, according to various sources. So perhaps this is to ensure there’s a general “ah yes, that movie” feeling to its release on Christmas. I could see the warp occurring for that.

I have a memory of seeing a teaser trailer for “The Flintstones” that was a full year in advance. But that film had obviously not even begun production and they showed the star, John Goodman, in front of a generic background. I have no doubt this was done in that way to immediately see focus and general audience reaction to an idea, with budget and production then to be geared based on that reaction. But in this case, it appears the movie is quite finished and shot. It makes very little sense to me.

But another possibility, unlikely but worth considering, is a non-awareness that things really have changed in the contemporary media-consuming world. Some of these marketing situations are decades old, being proven time and time again: Get a girl on the poster no matter what, big name stars are more important than a good script, build buzz when a movie is hard to explain in a line or two, encourage censorship where you can so that more people will see it, and so on. There’s an entire world of marketing that dates back to the 20s that’s just wonderful, including the publicity stunts of yore involving manipulating the press and public to think something horrible had happened that coincided with the title of a picture coming out. It’s very heartwarming, in a way. But those old chestnuts, while often a real firecracker, don’t always pan out. It is very hard for me to imagine that a nice introspective film based off of an easily accessible story from 80 years ago requires such build-up. Maybe in the future these films will be sprung on us unawares, a mere week or two before opening. Maybe, and this is also possible, I have not the slightest idea of what I’m talking about.

Lit Wit

My man Flack asked me to repair a little-touched directory of my artscene.textfiles.com site, which contains what were called “Litpacks”. I do not expect you to know what these are. What they were (they’re not really made any more) were compilations of fiction and poetry made by the artscene, that set of kids who did artwork that were the feature of one of the episodes of my documentary. Whereas the “artpacks” of the time contained many different drawings, these pure prose “litpacks” would be available as well.

It turned out, upon my going in to repair this directory, that it was in a horrible state. An index.html file had been dropped in that was completely misleading, and the films were inaccessible. I quickly removed this index.html and found additional onion layers of repair to be done.

The result is a greatly improved directory, which has not just an introduction to the litpack scene but over 120 examples, all of them culled not just from what was already there, but from my suddenly scouring various contributed collections for additional missing sets of files. I had previously only offered parts 1, 3 and 7, for example, and now have shoved in parts 2, 4, 5, and 6 where possible. It is more complete, better arranged, and imminently more browsable.

I mention this because it’s such a core of what I am. Once I was alerted that my own collection, my own collection was in a sub-par state, I could think of nothing else. Several hours of work resulted in the current state. I found out, for example, that I had multiple copies of the files but the sizes were different. It turned out that some of the versions of the files had passed through a number of bulletin board systems that had repackaged them with BBS ads. I made these slightly different filenames and described them as such. This minor situation was greater than I had previously understood, and was one of those situations where I had set aside some collections because of the lack of coherency to the collections. Now I have made some nice inroads, and the archive will grow as an example.

I do not pretend these files are overly important or earth-shattering. I certainly do not implore you to download them, unpack them, acquire the right viewer to see them properly (ACiDView is a good one) and mull over the writings, thinking you will great insights. That’s not my job, really. I don’t play judgment games with the files I am given. I just get them up for people to be able to reference, like Flack had intended to do with his friend and which he can do properly now. I have no doubt there are gems among this pile, but today is not the day that I found them or ask you to. It’s just nice to know that, at the end of the effort, things ended up a little nicer and a little more complete than how I found them. That’s the pleasure of archiving.

Strictly the Numbers

Like a surveyor assigned by his customer to demarcate the property lines, or perhaps some sort of explorer entrusted by his royal to understand the nature of the realm, I spent some time trying to get a grip on exactly how big textfiles.com is and what is where. Here is what I have sort of come back with.

Textfiles.com and webfiles.textfiles.com, the collections of BBS era (and BBS-era-like) textfiles that are the core of my archive, is 2 gigabytes in size.

Ancillary textfiles.com collections such as etext, digest and the like, are another 3 gigabytes.

Artscene.textfiles.com, which is all those crazy artscene-related files I just mentioned, weighs in at 77 gigabytes.

Audio.textfiles.com, the “sound of online”, which has video as well as tons of sound stuff, is a portly 176 gigabytes.

Pdf.textfiles.com, containing PDFs, is just 25 gigabytes large.

Mirrors of sites I think are important that lurk about with the textfiles.com brand but aren’t really “mine” in the sense of me curating them (like the bitsavers.org collection) adds another 30-40 gigabytes.

cd.textfiles.com, finally, is bloating up the world at over 300 gigabytes.

So the question that comes to mind, to the cascades of letters I get that boil down to “give this entire thing to me right now via whatever means necessary” is what do they mean when they say that? Do they mean textfiles.com’s proper text collection, which is less than one half of one percent of all my data? Or do they mean they want it all, a process that will require a 1 terabyte drive and a few days of copying? Either way, it’s nice to have some harder numbers as I go into tenth anniversary celebrations.

3 Comments

This letter came in, in response to this weblog entry.

Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:00:06 -0500
From: Nick Nelson 
To: mailbox@textfiles.com
Subject: Maybe Midphase used to blow goats..

Hi Jason.

First, name's Nick Nelson, I'm part of the UK2 Group who recently
(within the last 7 months) purchased Midphase.com, as well as the rest of the family,
and made various other acquistions throughout the hosting industry.

It bothers me  - that your review, is listed so highly in google..
while I have no doubt in 06, your review was likely justified. No doubt.

It's 08 now..and I'd like to ask that you reconsider, or at least, give us another shot?

Maybe even amend the review informing clients that Midphase was
purchased, and that as far as you know, we could be the best hosting provider in the
world.

Yes - we purchased a brand, with a few bad reviews associated with it,
and we have to live with that. But it definitely can't hurt to kick off an email
maybe attempting to mend ties a bit.

What do you say? Give midphase another chance..or at least inform
your visitors that the blog post is 2 years old and Midphase is now under completely
new management?

I'd be willing to extend a free year's hosting for you to give us
another shot, anywhere in the UK2 Group family.

14 Comments

I am on Facebook, that umpteenth generation networking site that has benefited from the bones and corpses of all the sites before it. I have been using it for some time, and like all of these contemporary creations, I am taken with the complexity of them, as well as what is annoying.

Some very old lessons have been learned and so use of the site is enjoyable. I am pleased with the contextual link-pasting; the Facebook will browse the other end of a link and download whatever images are there, allowing you to “sign” the link with an appropriate icon for what is there. Similarly, links to sites like Youtube will bring up a little Youtube control panel icon so you can go right to the video. It even absorbs the text from the linked-to site for you to choose to put in your provided link. This is some very pleasant contextual pasting, and is a significant amount of years old in the User Interface field… but it’s great to see it in use.

Also like a lot of such sites, Facebook tends to have a flat-field problem; sure, you can say how you know a person and even define the status of your relationship to that person, but you can’t have circles of access to your own stuff. I have a lot of people who want me to be a myspace-like friend (and I want to be the myspace-like friend of others!), with “myspace-like friend” meaning “I have never actually met you and you certainly don’t consider me a buddy, but you are really cool.” There’s no way to really do that beyond holding two facebook accounts, where one is for close friends who you want to tell you’re taking a dump or going to be at some party downtown, and then the other one where you do air guitar poses and let everyone know they’re absolutely awesome for making it down to the club tonight. And also to buy your new stuff which just came out! Which is also awesome!

I can’t blame Facebook for this, because most sites seem to have done no real exploration/experimentation into this realm. You can sort of do it with livejournal, that is, have friends and then “people who can look at your crap”, but that’s not the same as “anyone can look at my crap / people who identify with my crap / people who see my secret crap”. Since Facebook seems to be trying to evolve into next-generation thinking with their stuff, I hope something like this will happen. Unfortunately, we seem to be moving to the next generation of advertisements and choking the site down with absolutely worthless applications, but I can hope.

Anyway.

Recently, Facebook added an instant messaging application.

For a short, almost wintery-frost moment of time, this thing is a delicious buffet of communication delight, a tasty realm of muffin goodness. Let me tell you why.

Facebook’s IM application is made using crazy script thingies and sits on the bottom of your Facebook page, lurking as a little grey bar of decoration. It seems quiet, a still pond or pile of forgotten cinderblock. Most people, and I do mean most, don’t really pay any attention to it.

But what it enables you to do is this:

• See every one of your friends who are currently connected.
• Start conversations with them.
• Browse the Facebook site as if you were not talking on the bottom.
• Not lose the conversation as you do this.
• Start multiple conversations along the bottom.
• Get alerts that people want to speak to you.

It’s the kind of hack that in some circles would get you ridiculed as you described the process by which you intended to do it. This is a bunch of scripting that is implementing its own random protocols, blowing out its own crazy crap in what I’ll bet is plain text to central servers that are, to some extent, archiving the information to get around the fact that a webpage should really really not be a stateful client. This is an insanely bad idea, like when we all rushed headlong into using web pages for credit card purchases long before things were ready. The end justifies in the means, of course, so people don’t mind as long as it’s not them, currently, being screwed.

Since the thing is a security nightmare, it might as well be a complete and total nightmare, like the ones where you wake up and then find out you haven’t actually woken up. So it constantly re-titles the webpage to indicate you got a message. It keeps a list of people who were sort of recently on, applying some crazy routine to determine idle activity on a page. In other words, it gives you a lot of information on people they probably don’t know they’re getting and it does it all the time.

I’m sure someone like Dan Kaminsky will wander along and utterly face-rape this thing into oblivion, but until then, I do want to say what the most important aspect of this new feature is to me, because I love it.

When people are your friends but not really your friends, you are sometimes cornered into being nice and gracious and generous when you really don’t want to be. What saves you, often, is your generosity being in the realm of the inconvenient. “Come by anytime,” you say. “We’ll hang out,” you promise. You are lying. You don’t want this but it’s a nice thing to say. Inconvenience, however, will save you. It’s a pain in the ass to track you down. It’s easy to ignore a mail and claim later that the Internet ate it. You have, in other words, a layer of protection.

This strips that away, utterly and totally. Now, anyone who sees you’re browsing your webpage, people who you listed as your friends but they’re not really your friends, can chat with you right now, right away. You stopped into Facebook to see if you got any mail or to check up on a person you’re supposed to meet with, and now your grey bar is blinking and fucking goddamnit you’re trapped. I absolutely adore that.

I am a communicator. Actually, I graduated from Communicator and past UberCommunicator to OverCommunicator Supreme. I sit on a throne of Way Too Much Talking and I will wield my scepter of Incessant Trivia and Yammering until nobody in my court can stand on their own feet. I know this. It’s probably a big character flaw and maybe I even notice that myself, but sometimes, I just have so much to say or want to say hello or just want to hang out and shoot the shit until the sun burns out and then shoot the shit about the sun burning out.

OverCommunicator Supreme loves that there’s this application that lets him immediately, instantly barge into the lives of other people, people working or browsing or busy with job or life, and go HEY HOW YA DOING. I will delight in hopping onto your couch and starting a conversation you have no time for and no will to endure and oh well, here I am and you friended me and that means something, motherfucker. I am intensely interested in you and now your little offer of Facebook linkage seems like it carries a slightly higher price than seeing my status updates. Salutations, buddy! Welcome to a new level of conversation hell. I am your host and the main act.

This can’t sustain itself as it currently is. I’m sure it will give you easier ways to block people, or turn it off in the preferences. It may be that way now, but people are not inclined to just shut it off until they have a good reason.

I am that good reason.

WHY HELLO THERE.

4 Comments

Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:22:16 -0400
From: bobby bobby
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Certain textfile temporarily deleted.

Hello jason, i would first like to say textfiles is a very useful and interesting website.
I have used this specific article (http://www.textfiles.com/reports/ecology.rpt)
for a biology report, and to my unfortunate conclusion and past attempts, it is susceptible to
plagiarism findings by a search engine as simple as google. Being a secure and
conscientious teacher, she might search my report for plagiarism and fail me on my report.

I ask you with the greatest amount of respect and sympathy to please temporarily
take off that specific article for a total of 10 days so she does not find any plagiarism copying
in my report. Please email me back if this can be done, thank you.

From: Jason Scott
To: Plagiarist

No.

7 Comments

Two corrections to an entry I did a little while ago about talks I gave this year.

The first is that I forgot to mention Shmoocon, which I also attended and gave a talk at. An ironic thing, considering I recently added all the talks from the 2008 Shmoocon to my collection. The talk was on my footage recorded while at Mammoth Cave Park, and specifically the Bedquilt Cave. It was fun, although I look like living hell and am very tired. (I actually napped on couches in the hallway, because my energy was so low).

The second correction is that on a lark I submitted a proposal and it appears I am speaking at HOPE. My talk will be a whirlwind of hacker lore to make up for the fact that it’s 2008 and many attendees were born after 1990. I’ll be going over all the basics as fast as I can, to be a little primer for those that want some jumping off points. So there we go! I’ve spoken and am speaking in even more locations than I thought.

This past weekend was centered around my 20th High School Reunion. Yes, I really am that old. Held in a restaurant in New York City (the school itself was a couple dozen miles north of the city), a nice contingent showed up and a good time seemed to be had by all, especially the drunk ones. High School was a great time for me and I’m not afraid to see how people are doing. People are doing well, although maybe the losers self-selected themselves out of attending.

Two things to mention about my weekend in the city.

First of all, I was lucky enough to spend some time at the Telectroscope, a beautiful piece of work where a mythical tunnel between London and New York allows people to stand before a large telescope and see people on the other side of the Earth. Sure, you can argue about the ease of the technology, but the presentation was absolutely top notch. It was quite surreal to stand in front of this huge round glass, with the Brooklyn Bridge behind me, and be looking at a nice bunch of Londoners, stuck in the rain (they had umbrellas) and waving back. It was an excellent project and I’m happy to have been able to see it.

Second, I was also given the hint about The MOCCA Art Festival, which is a comic artist event where many dozens of talented and amazing comic book and art people show up and display their wares. I may have found the guy who will do some of the art for my packaging there. I even ran into a few people I’d interviewed in the last two interview cycles, which was neat as well.

All in all, a pretty great time. You know, at one time in my life I was instilled with a terror of New York City. I now consider those lost years to be some of the most tragic of my life. Here’s hoping I can stem the tragedy more in the years to come.

1 Comment

By users, of course, I mean the many fine millions who have browsed TEXTFILES.COM and its sites over the years.

• It can be really frustrating that the textfiles.com bandwidth seems so slow, so you better open 30-60 simultaneous connections via your Internet2-ready connection in Europe and get all the files at once before it slows down more.

• Textfiles.com is awesome. What it really needs, however, is javascript, ads, and everything else that makes a reasonable person abandon web-browsing as a soothing activity.
• If you’re going to write an erotic fantasy story about two of your classmates fourteen years ago, be sure not to include their real names at the bottom along with what town and high school the fantasy is taking place, because there’s nothing less awesome for you than a couple of 30 year old guys discovering said erotic fantasy is far and away the top google hit for their names.
• If you want to offer to be a mirror for textfiles.com, be sure to do so using a machine you don’t own on a pipe you don’t own using an account you don’t pay for.
• If you want to utterly, totally piss off a ministry, file the transcribed pamphlets they made 15 years ago under “Occult”.
• Textfiles.com has a file written in an afternoon by a 13 year old boy who uploaded it to one BBS in 1982 a month before the BBS went down forever, which the boy, now a 35 year old programmer, found online and sat there stunned.
• The same lesson about writing erotic fiction about your classmates goes the same for writing about a teaching assistant sleeping with your students, under your real name, and then going on to be a professor.
• If you can’t remember the title, writer, full subject, any salient phrases, or context of a file, Jason Scott will still somehow find it for you, you just know it.
• Saying mean things is mean.
• It is now possible for a person to have been allowed on the computer and internet for the first time, found textifles.com, and get inspired by stuff you read and end up going to college in the subject that interested you.

Keep the lessons coming!

5 Comments

The problem with filmmaking is that everyone has advice but a lot of advice is specific to that filmmaker. Sometimes people have general ideas that are probably of use to a set of folks, like how to do cheap-ass dolly shots or cheap-ass lightsaber effects. But other times, the big questions like “how do you edit” and “how do you sell it” are all kind of different for different goals.

My documentaries have not (up to this point) been things where I write out the answers and the “script” (a set of planned points) and then go out and film things. I go out and find a nice swath of people on points of a spectrum, and hit them up for questions, and then go carefully through the answers. I don’t go into an interview saying “This is the ‘Text Adventures were a New Kind of Literature’ guy” and then force them through the grinder until they say what I need. Some people really do this. I won’t and I don’t even know if I can.

The downside of this is that I end up with a lot of footage, and right now, I go through things someone says with a fine tooth comb, and this is very time consuming. Time consuming enough that it’s going to take a while. When I come out the other end with my final quotes and collections of clips, I then start to assemble the actual production. This happens relatively fast, but it’s because of this massive backload of quotes and comments I’ve already collected. This is not dissimilar to how a restaurant gives you a nice meal in under 20 minutes, but it’s because of hours and maybe days of preparation that happened before that. Your meal didn’t take 20 minutes to make; it took many hours and the final bit was 20 minutes.

I don’t know what’s important or not. It might be a pause, it might be a gesture, it might be a statement. I collect statements together that are in a general sense the same ideas, but that’s pretty arbitrary. I also massively overshoot; this is a 120 hour collection of footage for what will likely be 3 hours of final product, so there’s a 1 to 40 filming ratio. (This is a lot for a sit-down documentary, but not a lot for a shot-on-the-run documentary). I just don’t know yet what will end up at the end.

Yes.

A VERY IMPORTANT POINT: Jeremy Douglass, who is the fellow in the video clip above, is spending half the clip listening to me ask a question, and then is beginning to answer the question, when I cut him off. In other words, he’s edited for comedy in the clip, and is in fact portrayed absolutely opposite to how he answers questions in the clips I’ve saved. Editing, my friends, is everything.

4 Comments

I began some work on another music video this weekend.

Have no fear, nothing’s being pushed aside; I just finished all my interviews from my London trip in December 2006 and am now going through the interviews from my very successful West Coast jaunt this past November. I’m currently pulling brilliance out of a pile of even more brilliance that is the Mary Ann Buckles interview. The work is progressing nicely on this, so don’t get worried.

Some general experiences are now coming out when working on music videos, so I thought I’d share. I’ve discussed this subject before, of course.

Probably the most important questions to ask with a music video are:

• Should this even be made?
• Does the artist need to be in it?

Sometimes, you just have no need to make a video for a certain song. If you’re lucky enough not to be contracted or under duress to shoot a music video, like I am, then you stop considering it. Not everyone has this option and sometimes I think our craziest music videos come out from people contracted to do music videos who really have no particular love for the song so they just go crazy on the little video itself.

Also, the artist’s involvement may not be needed directly. Perhaps you are doing animation and the song is all that’s needed. Or maybe you use other actors or people on the street and the band never appears. Since for some bands this is their big moment in the sun, they might want to be in it, or consider it a critical point. Other times, not so much.

I then start thinking about these questions:

• Do we need a story told during it, or is it just a bunch of shots?
• If the artist is in it, what are they best at? Posing? Dancing? Looking good? Nothing?
• Are there ways to make the video distinct, notable on its own grounds?
• Can you do that without dominating/supplicating the artist?
• Does the artist have a say? What are they comfortable with?
• What can you steal to make it all work?
• How much time do you have, for the whole project and the artist?
• What problems need to be solved now, because they’ll take a long time?

If you’re lucky, you tool around, do some test shooting, try different ideas, see what works. You talk with the artist, show what you got, and listen to the song for any other subtlety you might want to pull from the lyrics. In my case, there’s a lot of trivia I need to bone up on, and a lot of art direction I need to consider.

It’s a lot of fun. Consider having fun yourself sometime.

Comments Off on On the Onset of Another Video

I am speaking at DEFCON this year. It’ll be about text adventures, my documentary, and hopefully some example footage from the new film. That’s in August. No idea what day within that, and more than once the day/time’s been changed in the program, then changed once more. So not much details other than it’ll be in Las Vegas. See you there.

I’ve decided not to propose a talk to HOPE, even if it’s the last one, as they claim. I can’t think of anything good for that crowd (Saving Digital History from 4 years ago was probably one of the best speeches I gave, and that was at HOPE) and I waited too long to submit. So consider me a civilian, although I’m supposedly one of the interviewees or DJs for the radio station they’re running there. I’ll see you around.

I spoke at Penguicon, Notacon, and ROFLcon this year, so I can’t complain about public exposure. My “Before the LOL” talk has now been downloaded 4,500 times from its archive.org page, so it’s been a pretty good year for me.

I’ve got some late-year possibilities brewing as well.

Money’s at an all-time low while I gear up for the post-production of my film, so my ability to just jaunt around is going to be restricted. I won’t shut up in this weblog, though!

2 Comments

Recently, Escapist Magazine won one of those most chummy of awards, the Webby. I can’t pretend to know the exact manner and approach the “Webbys” take to choosing the winner of each set of candidates, but no doubt votes and cries from the web-browsing public are somewhat involved.

I will contend that the reason for Escapist’s victory in these awards is due to one thing only: Zero Punctuation. I will go even further than that, to make it clear that the only reason The Escapist exists for many people is as a shipping container for Zero Punctuation, requiring it to merely not damage its precious contents on a weekly basis. More on this shortly.

This situation, where this website is a forgettable bunch of shredded newspapers used as padding for a golden egg of criticism freshly arrived from Australia, wasn’t always the case. A mere three years ago or so, PDFs appeared at this new site called The Escapist, and it was, while not without predecessors, a real splash of a magazine.

The layouts, both on the website and in the PDF format, were distinctive. At a time when gaming websites became more and more screaming, blinking billboards, breathlessly regurgitating press releases and screenshots provided for them by game company mechanisms, the Escapist was almost a calm Gibraltar rising above others with its calm lines and clear writing.

It may seem odd to call back a mere 3 years as being ancient history, but this is the nature of gaming magazines, which are truly and completely some of the proudest whores on the street corner of publishing, not just aware of their shallowness and proximity to corruption, but prone to wallow in it frequently. Occasionally, a writer or editor will bleat out a “but we want to be honest to the fans” editorial, mostly due to being caught out in yet another new and spectacular way they have sold out, a way previously unknown but quickly becoming an “industry standard” as if the fact that “everybody does it” washes it clean of moral decay. Month to month, it’s the little jabs, the shifted size of advertisements, the addition of “skins” to utterly sell out to a soon-forgotten product. Within a year you do not even notice the slide having gone so far, and the “controversy” raging is merely a slight disagreement on a point of procedure in a depth previously thought unthinkable.

Such a surprise were these magazines, these PDF-downloadable versions of an interesting layout, that I started to collect them. I would pull down these self-contained magazines and sock them away on my website, considering them a worthwhile addition to my archives. Strictly speaking, this magazine was more a “zine” than anything else; they were relatively small issues and the layout allowed for only the lightest of overviews of the subjects at hand. But they were free, and pretty, and I couldn’t argue that for a zine it was a very very nice zine. The first issue was an anaemic seventeen pages, but there were no advertisements and who could really argue with that.

The zine was also weekly, which may seem like forever in website output but in fact harkened to a simpler time and approach. You can fill your news site with “content” by merely raping every RSS feed around you, ending up with a scrolling set of text showing how absolutely on top of it and awesome your crack staff is. (Naturally, this monoculture means that if one site falls prey to a hoax or a misprint, all the sites do, but that’s why they make the words “Ooops, our bad”.) To step back, to request essays and musings on subjects both recent and stale gave this zine a particularly classy air.

Note, please, that I’m not saying this work was uniformly excellent. It just presented what it did have in an excellent form that showed effort, talent and clarity of vision. The actual article quality itself is generally outside my realm, because what I want and like differs from others and so on; I can attest, however, that for the price and the availability, I was a delighted, satisfied customer.

A highlight relevant to my own interest is issue number 55 which contains the article/essay “The Short, Happy Life of Infocom” by Lara Crigger. The article is non-distinct, possibly cribbed from the MIT Business Case Study “Down from the Top of Its Game”. But it is pretty, and laid out nicely, which is more than one could say for a lot of other articles on the subject on web pages. The issue contains other pleasant articles, typical for Escapist’s approach: an overview of game theorist Raph Koster, an interview with John Romero, a pseudonym-laden overview of a game company falling over, and an overview of The Sims Online, defined as “the 20 million dollar failure”. Again, no ads pollute this work, the 55th weekly edition of the zine.

Naturally, this could not continue forever.

Issue #104 is the last issue produced until this old paradigm. Continuing the tradition of being relatively small (a mere 21 pages), its articles are a blend of game review and theory, with a public service page (making it 20 pages, really) and a cross-property advertisement for a sister publication owned by the same parent firm.

I have collected the sum of the released issues for you, as they became harder and harder to find on the site itself. I’m sure they’re still buried in there, but it’s not worth the effort. I have all 104. (My mirrors do too, should you find my connection slow.)

As I have implied, this short and delightful party came to an end.

In June of 2007, Escapist magazine editor Julianne “Andraste” Greer merrily announced that they would no longer be providing the magazine in the PDF form and layout. The congratulations and accolades quickly faded to be replaced with discontentment and disenchantment at how things had devolved into a look utterly without distinction or usefulness. Art director Jon “Landslide” Hayter, in a tone not outside of a waitress apologizing that the pancake house was out of pancakes, said the old approach had been too “time and man-power intensive” and so while they were sad to see it go, they were not bringing it back in favor of being available in more platforms.

Greer showed surprise that people would be up in arms or dismayed by the change. As the person who founded the endeavor, she appeared to have even forgotten her own history, when this little effort showed some quality beyond the usual tripe.

I wrote off The Escapist then, as I’m sure many did. And then Zero Punctuation happened, and I swear that it took me a while before I even connected the two, the place holding this wonderful little creation and that PDF-based zine that I once enjoyed glancing through less than a year earlier. Once I did, I was pleased that there was an excuse to stop by, even though I had no overarching need to browse the rest of the site.

Within a short time, even Zero Punctuation was corrupted. Until very recently (this week), when you brought up the animation, a little window within the animation would blow an ad into your face like a spitwad. If you take no action, it sat there for the entire length of the presentation, a hubris even network television and youtube won’t exhibit. You could “close” it, but it merely sat there, a closed line that your mind had to try and ignore, waiting for the opportunity to spring back out again. It is a moral compass for this modern Escapist that something as pleasant as a column could be overlaid with yet another worthless, generic ad for something I don’t have an urge to play, with yet another cover portraying someone or something holding a weapon. The true irony is how this ad is overlaid on a column/presentation that skewers this very same lameness.

The layout for Zero Punctuation changed again recently, removing this ad, and I am sure it is some methodology to increase the exposure to advertisements. In any given shift of action, I assume it is to further ad revenue. It is the beginning, the middle, and the end of this culture’s literary output, with only the style and depth of intrusion of the various methodologies changing.

I am sure the creators of the Escapist might feel the need to stop by and explain to me, utilizing some unknown quantity and justification, why the choices had to be made and why they decided that being like every other rag online and off was a brilliant move. I am not overly interested in this explanation, much as I would be uninterested in the explanation handed to me by a prostitute, readjusting her short skirt, justifying the actions taken for fifty dollars, a hot shower and a place out of the rain.

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