ASCII by Jason Scott

Going through the process of making a documentary a second time causes me to come face to face with a few situations I’d forgotten about. You tend to gloss over stuff, and forget some of the sharp edges. I guess it’s how we cope.

Anyway, I have drives of footage, which include stuff that has been gone through and stuff not gone through. There should be no reason for stuff to have stuck around in “not gone through” except for time; the process should be methodical. However, there were two sets of interviews that have been sitting around way too long.

The reason is they’re dark.

The camera I use is a little tricky in some light situations, and it took me a while to really learn some of the situations it would freak out in. As a result, some percentage are a bit too dark, dark enough that you would notice if I put them side to side with other shots. The nature of digital recording with video is that there’s also a greater noise floor in the video when you look at them closely.

This is all fixable, everything is always fixable, but given the choice of sitting through watching my dark shots and going to the shots I’m really proud of, I keep going to the others. Luckily, I’m running out of choices and that means I’m nearly done with the clip-making. And it means I’m going through the remnants now.

Given a choice between a dark shot and a light shot saying the same thing, I will choose the light shot. This gives advantage to one group of interviewees for no good reason. 99% of the dark shots may not make it in. It makes it very hard to set the time to go through them, know it may reveal just seconds of used footage.

But it has to be done, and I am doing it. It’s just tough. It always is.

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Oh, Trixter, you silly person.

You work yourself up into such sadness while life has handed you nothing but jewels and treasure.

You state dreams and projects you feel could not be finished, to feel like your life is going to be a series of incomplete projects choking your days and filling them with regrets. Ha, I say. Ha! As if to butter the corncob of despair with a melted yellow layer of irony, you point to accomplishments of my own as examples of being left behind, missing opportunities, being incomplete.

You probably never intended to name your two sons after the greatest comic book characters in history, but you expectedly did it, and that’s awesome in itself. In fact, it’s a sign. You never intend to do the greatest things ever, but you end up doing them anyway.

I had this mulled idea of doing a documentary on BBSes, this concept that was like many I would probably have fiddled with and then forgotten forever, but then I heard about this little project you were involved in, and I was inspired by anything to absolute do it. And I knew I was doomed to try to pull off a DVD by myself. I knew I needed a guide, a mentor, a tour mensch to make sure I did everything right and not just passably. And who did I turn to?

Here we are, intertwined in destiny, two young kids who both attended the North American International Demoparty in 1996, and we didn’t even meet; we lived different and separate lives and yet we each traveled many miles to be in that specific place to be a part of the proceedings. That says something, yes it does.

You list off your projects like they’re insurmountable mountains. Tell me how you found yourself in Utah winning a competition handily with your 8088 in tow. Tell me how you found yourself in two runs of Blockparty grabbing prizes left and right and meeting heroes. Now ask yourself, who inspired me to want to make Blockparty come together in the first place!

Haven’t you realized yet how much I love you and will help you see things through?

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Hey, did you know I can speak German? Neither did I!

“Ich habe vorher ein paar Jahre an einer Dokumentation uber Mailbox-Systeme (BBS) gearbeitet und als ich damit fertig war, merkte ich, dass ich viele Fahigkeiten aufgebaut hatte, die ich noch woanders einsetzen konnte.”

OK, fine, I was translated from english answers I gave. That was nice of them.

I don’t know how much people who read this weblog will find new, but there you go.

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I was at Penguicon 6.0, which is the first time I attended it. Therefore anything I say is from the point of view from attending a mere 16.6% of all Penguicons.

I was asked to speak about interactive fiction, and what the hey, I have to brush up on talking about this subject because I’m likely going to be doing so often for the next couple of years, so I agreed. A little later, I was told that to pay the reduced presenter admission instead of the full $45 admission, I’d have to present on two more “panels” as well as the one I was going to do. I was given a plate of five that needed speakers, and I chose the two I was least uncomfortable speaking about. I stress two facts here again: as a speaker I was required to pay, and I was thrown on two panels not because of any expertise I might have but because a body was needed for those panels.

From a speaker’s point of view, that is, someone like myself who has done a few dozen presentations of this format at conventions like this, the whole thing is run horribly. I didn’t, for example, totally lock onto the fact that I’d be paying admission because I’ve never seen that before, anywhere. Presenters that have to pay? Why? In Penguicon’s case, it appears to be because they pack the schedule with so many panels, in so many locations, that the only way they could possibly have anything approaching decent income is to charge those panelists, as hosting over three hundred events means that you can’t be giving that much admission money away. OK, well, OK.

My two additional panels were “The Future of User Interfaces” and “When the hell did video games become cool?”. Left alone, I’d have not chosen either, but compared to the other three I was given to look at, I chose these.

Some time later, my co-presenter on the User Interfaces panel canceled. The way that I found this out was my name-catcher caught my name on a random livejournal post, mentioning, as an aside, that my co-presenter was not going to make it. As a total lark, and because I knew he was coming, I mailed the presentation person that Paul “Froggy” Schneider was around to be my presenter. Later, Froggy did a reload (this was the day before the con) to find out he was on the schedule. This is how it was done. No confirmation.

During the day of our presentation, Froggy did a reload and found out we had another presenter on the schedule. This is how we both found out. No e-mails. No confirmation. Sure, you could point out “we had 300 events to manage, so we didn’t have time to confirm”, but then the immediate question is why the hell did you schedule 300 mish-mashed events instead of, say, 100 good ones? I still have that question.

For the actual presentation/panel, Froggy and I showed up. Our third presenter didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t notified he was on the panel and didn’t do a reload of the schedule to see if he was on there. Either way, there wasn’t a third presenter, so I grabbed someone out of the audience and put him on the panel. As it stands, Adam handled things very well.

You can’t see how well the panel went because there were no recordings. There weren’t any recordings in any of my panels. Sorry. I generally record these things, but something told me not to and that something was right. Froggy and I had a good time, at least.

For my presentation on Interactive Fiction, the reason I’d flown in for the event, I walked in at 9:30am for my 10am presentation to find an empty room, no sound set up (it was in the corner behind a screen with no set up projector), and a pair of mattresses on the stage. So fine, I presented anyway. A nice set of people came in. I never saw a staff member. In fact, the whole weekend, I never interacted with a staff member of Penguicon except when I bought my ticket that I had thought (wrongly) I’d not have to pay for.

The final panel was similarly done, with no staff members, and the panelists doing what they could. We all agreed the topic was stupid. We went back and forth and I do what I always do when I have no script: talk and talk and fucking talk. I don’t mind hearing myself talk, obviously, but who knows what all those folks came into the room looking for.

So yeah, if you’re a presenter, and/or have experience with any cons out there (professional, non-professional, what have you), then this has to be one of the most adrift cons I’ve ever been a part of. (And I was at a couple Rubicons, friends. I know adrift when I see it.)

However, if you were an attendee, it was probably pretty great.

The people, who I saw milling in the hallways and walking the rooms, were really nice. These were folks out for a good time, and I think they got it. I saw smiles, singing, loud drumming, and costume wearing that was both in a spirit of fun and not at all uncomfortable.

The consuite, which was loaded with free food and conversation, had happy people at all hours of the day and night. I met some folks I’d been looking to see for a long time, and we had great chats. To finally meet Frank Hayes was a big deal for me, as was seeing Randall Monroe (although he was surrounded and I got no time with him). I met some people to potentially interview for my next documentary projects, and I got to eat some awesomely prepared Liquid Nitrogen ice cream.

I would therefore equate Penguicon with a really cool party bus that, if you don’t make the effort, you won’t notice has the steering wheel and gas pedal taped down with duct tape and a note saying “turn off if near wall”.

One specific moment, however, particularly struck me.

I was on my way over to the LAN party room to find people, and I passed one of the larger presentation rooms. Something was going on, likely, someone with a guitar. I wondered if it was Frank Hayes, and paused for a moment, and stuck my head in.

At the back of the room, somewhat near me, was this guy. He was a little older than I was, and he had a plate of muffins. He was holding it like a cigarette girl, carrying it while also watching the proceedings. He turned and saw me, and smiled.

He made this sort of gesture, a “welcome! come on in.”, with a smile. I can generally read people. He meant it. It wasn’t creepy. It was touching. He was honestly seeing someone on the fence of coming in and honestly was saying “come on in”. It was very sweet of him. If I hadn’t had something to go to, I’d have stepped right in. That charity and inclusion wins a lot of points with me.

Still, I was later asked if I would be there next year. I said yes. I meant no.

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Truly, digger.org is the way it should be done.

Celebrating ten years of effort, this website is dedicated to a relatively obscure game called Digger that came out for IBM PCs in 1983. I was one of the owners of this game, and absolutely loved the thing. A riff off of the arcade game Dig-Dug, it had, at the time, an amazing combination of sound and graphics, and felt like I was playing a game worth shoving quarters into. I enjoyed my time with it but life happened and I have very rarely thought back to that program.

Andrew Jenner, though, went ahead and did right by Digger, many times over. The program, long since incompatible with modern machines (in 1998), was in danger of being completely obscured and difficult to ever enjoy again. He disassembled the program, rewrote what needed to be rewrote, and made it compatible to the present day. His website goes into the process in great detail.

In fact, he goes into everything in great detail: the graphics, the company that made it, the programmers and people, the many little facts that are relevant to Digger, whichever direction you wanted to go.

I thought this was what the world wide web was going to be; I thought it was going to be a place where you could find, with ease and excellent presentation, all you needed to know about a subject that had caught your fancy and bring you along to not only being educated on what you were looking for, but get an entire bushel of additional information you never expected you would find. This is not borne out to be the case, generally, but it’s certainly the case here. I wish more people took Andrew’s approach.

Check out a game that was fun playing the first time, and worth playing again and again.

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One of my fine users sent in the following four questions. I figured everybody had to hear my answers right now, so here you go.

When you first started publishing, did you ever feel in moments that you had some trouble getting people to notice? Did that impact your feelings about your projects? If it did not, then why?

Well, I’ve been publishing an awful long time; the first time I wrote stuff that other people had to print and others had to listen to was probably my role as Humor Columnist for Horace Greeley High School back in 1988. I did a calculation at the end of the school year and I’d written more for that paper than anyone else, likely over a dozen of the other staff members combined. For the April Fool’s issue of that paper, I wrote an entire page of text, which is crazy looking back. And yes I have all the articles I wrote online. They’re pretty OK, considering I wrote them all when I was 16 and 17. I also started a school humor magazine, Esnesnon, which I have the first issue of online and which went on, absolutely astoundingly, for another 10 years at that school.

Before that publishing, of course, I had bulletin board systems. Years and years of them, starting from when I was 11. Since I was delighted to have any outlet whatsoever, I got a lot of experience just writing stuff for the joy of having it somewhere else besides inside my head, where maybe it should have stayed. Left alone, my writings are a little more “me me me” than even now, with elaborate creations like this one being loosed upon the world. So I was “publishing” in a way with almost no direct feedback that I was even in the ballpark. San that feedback loop, I had little worry about it.

In college, I was on the school newspaper, school radio stations (FM and AM) and did a little work with a humor magazine. For the newspaper I wrote articles and drew editorial cartoons. Throughout that college newspaper work, I don’t recall many times someone would engage me about anything I did, outside of some chats with other newspaper staffers. There just wasn’t much in the way of feedback loops or seeking legitimacy/meaning in the words of others. I just liked doing it.

So no, no real impact either way, so when I work on my stuff now, every bit of contact/feedback (and there has been a lot more from the films and the weblog than I can ever recall) is a bonus. It’s a little extra niceness, not a required part of the transaction. I get fan mail and hate mail, but it doesn’t make me stop and go. I do listen, however; if a lot of people tell me something and that something wasn’t a particularly strong personal choice, I’m more than willing to shift things around or improve/sully the project as needed.

I’ve never considered you a divisive figure, but you do have your share of critics. How do you deal with the emotions that come from people not agreeing with you, not liking you? Does it ever get you down? Why? Why not?

What a nice way of putting it.

One has to make the division between Jason the ASCII Blogger, Jason the Documentary Film Guy, Jason the Textfiles.com Guy, Jason the wizard of a MUD, etc. All of these reach different sets of people to different amounts, with some overlap but not complete overlap. I’ve found I’m thought of in radically different ways by different people, and in cases where those two worlds crash together, I get to watch “Jason is a Great Historian” meet up with “Jason was a cockbiter when I dealt with him in 1994”. The reasons for hating (and liking!) me are variant: a personal slight, a disapproval of the way I phrase things, the way I’m a bully in some spheres, my overarching love of myself, and all the other little faults I’ve been informed of over the decades.

What I have determined, if one wants to take the jump of calling this “wisdom”, is that doing anything to any degree before others results in criticism. I won’t use the self-serving term “taking a stand” because it sounds like I’m always in the right. But going out there, stating something clearly, means that you’ve set yourself up for someone to come along and say “Man, that guy’s totally wrong”. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time sets you up to have it quoted back at you. Saying a LOT of stuff over a LOT of time sets you up to come face to face with contradicting yourself, being reminded you took someone’s pain too lightly, or made a silly declaration that you never should have.

When someone seems extraordinarily pissed at me, I spend some time chasing down the source of that animosity, just to make sure it’s not on the level of a gas leak (an ongoing situation I can rectify) as opposed to a forgotten slight (I called somebody something very bad once and they never forgot it).

On the whole, however, I have so many nice stories and so many great times with people, it’d be hard for me to turn away from those and say “everybody hates me, I should pack up and leave”. I don’t even know if I could really “pack up and leave”, it’s kind of the way I am to be this out there. I do recognize the need for knowing I am not universally beloved.

Did you ever feel like that despite your best efforts, you simply are not heard in the way you want?

I am positive of this. But I have to clarify that the question is among the realm of “Did you ever feel, getting on a bicycle, that if you didn’t keep pedaling, your momentum would stop and you would fall over?” It’s kind of the nature of things that we miscommunicate all the time. We lose either the ideas themselves or the context of them, or they’re presented in strange ways. Look at my documentary; I have this nice little package I put together, but people sometimes watch it on Google Video or torrent DVD-ROMs or watch ripped MPEGs and so on. That’s how they see it, and they’re fine with it. I’m fine with it too.

How do all of these things impact your momentum? Do they? Even for a second? And what do you do about that if it does?

In your letter, you hoped I wouldn’t respond with pithy short answers, but I have to say: it doesn’t. I’m doing what I do because I feel I have to. I’m working on stuff that I think needs to be done. I am of such a strong mind of this, I have worked hard to ensure you can enjoy or benefit from the stuff I’m doing without ever directly interacting with me. Tens of thousands of people do this on a daily basis; they use my sites without having to know anything about “the guy”. They watch the movie without knowing me (you can watch some episodes and never hear my voice). I enjoy spending time with myself but recognize not everyone does, so I appreciate the ability to avoid me entirely.

So I have no contingency for criticism halting me. I don’t think it really can.

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I was doing some chart work recently, and it reminded me I have the data for a year of goatse’ing people, along with pre-goatse logging as well. I decided it was time to run the numbers. Here’s some charts:

The Goatse switch-out happened on January 1st, so we can see an immediate change in the first chart. 2007-01 happens, and usage drops down massively. At the time this happened, and it got a lot of attention, people said that I’d brought even more pain on myself because it meant now everyone being linked in through all the weblog sites would use more bandwidth. As we can see, this isn’t the case. Myspace wastes galactic amounts of bandwidth; it appears every time many people go to webpages, they reload all the background images, including the Grim Reaper picture I used to have. Once they started ripping it out, even a link-fest from all the discussion websites couldn’t top that generic Myspace rapeage.

Since the usage was so massive before the Goatse’ing, I ran the second chart just to show usage from January of 2007 through to March of 2008. Here, we see a growth and then shrinkage; after people hear about the Goatse thing, it goes up a ton, then starts shrinking rapidly. In both March and May of 2007, about 75,000 people are Goatse’d or request to be Goatse’d.

The third chart goes even more granular than the second, showing the per-day story for being goatse’d. Obviously that massive spike in the beginning was all the weblogs finding out about it a day or two after I did it.

I can also tell you, definitively, that the goatse image was downloaded 703,899 times in 2007. Again, even though that’s an impressive number, the previous Grim Reaper image had been downloaded 2,531,662 times in 2006. Yes, that’s right, two million five hundred thousand times. My goal was to cut down on abuse of that image and I can assure you that it worked.

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I love getting mail. I especially like getting mail of stuff I ordered some time ago that is being hand-crafted for me and has to be sent from other countries. That’s particularly enjoyable mail.

Today’s mail provided me with a cute little device called the Uther Ethernet card. You are either going to be excited or indifferent when I tell you that this is an ethernet card for an Apple II.

Come on, say it: Apple II Ethernet Card.

There’s some history of Apple II Ethernet, but it’s a sad history, that ended badly with no actual cards being sold. All of this happened in the 1991-1993 era, and while there was a nice amount of discussion and press release about this item, it never actually existed. So the Uther’s existence was a big deal.

Mine came from a hand-made batch of 25. That’s the level of craftsmanship we have these days in the more obscure sectors: two dozen item runs, all hand-checked and mailed out. In some crazy way, it’s not unlike the dawn of personal computers, when you knew (or maybe refused to know) that the computer item you were getting was made by some guy or gal in a back room in an office somewhere, one of a tiny run of equipment you’d paid well for.

You get something like 70K/sec transfer rates out of your Apple II. Suck it up! That’s great!

And if you’re wondering how one actually accesses the Uther card, you need some sort of IP stack running. Luckily for anyone now sweating that idea, there’s a great little OS called Contiki that exists out there and will interface with this card. Pretty cool, huh.

I love this stuff, and that 2008 would be the year of getting one of my Apple IIs into my home network.

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I forgot how the whole thing got started (I think it was a conversation, or maybe an e-mail) but I started helping some students at WPI (a nearby college) with interviews of historical video game and gaming figures. What this consisted of was having a few students over, talking about editing, showing how I think about it, and answering some questions. In both cases this has happened, I also sat a student down and interviewed him blind, that is, not knowing a single thing about him before the interview started. Later I edited something together and sent it along, just to show some of my techniques.

Last year, these students ultimately interviewed Ralph Baer, he of videogame legend. This year, they interviewed Brian Moriarty, he of Infocom, LucasArts, and general amazing guy, one of my favorites.

I found out that their paper summarizing the process and a bunch of footage of Brian Moriarty is now up at this page. It’s all there, even the PDF of the paper for easy download and viewing. I see the students have taken my position on King of Kong. I don’t remember being in that mode when I saw them, but maybe they’re just reading my weblog.

If you’re waiting for my film to come out, you can’t do much better than to spend some time listening to the Professor as he talks about the industry and Infocom and where he thinks everything is going. They took my editing suggestions to heart (I’m impressed especially with a segment where Moriarty shows the craftmanship of an Infocom Feelie) and they’re a delight to sit through.

Enjoy the show.

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While I’m mucking about in Napster-era land, I did want to harken back and give some regard to a little program that popped up in the middle of the peer-to-peer boom times that really got my attention. It was called Scoundrel, and at the time, it really opened my eyes to where things were going.

At the time, we had Amazon, which was a massive repository of not just books and music to buy, but information about that music. Covers, track listings, reviews, and in some cases preview snippets were all in one place. In another realm, we had napster and napster-like servers (OpenNap comes to mind) with lots of various MP3 files, often divested of creator information, and of variant quality. (MP3 tags, a hack that brings to mind the SAUCE format of ANSI, later made nomenclature easier).

Scoundrel combined them, earning its name exquisitely. It would allow you to browse an Amazon page about an album, read up on it, and with a single click, send a smart agent off monitoring various napster/napster-like services, looking around for all the tracks, and keep doing so until it had acquired all the tracks it could, leaving you with an MP3 rendition of the chosen album.

It had some good extensible ideas, like a nod towards plugins for sites other than Amazon, and for services other than Napster. It had some strong potential to become the bridging program behind a lot of sites that were, inherently, vicious rivals in the wild. It was something else.

Here’s a mirror of that original Scoundrel site, with some overviews of what was at play, ways to use the program, forward-looking statements and the rest. How kind of that fellow to keep a copy around!

I wasn’t the only one enamored of this project, either; here’s a nice rant regarding Scoundrel and what it meant to the author at the time.

Most notably, a little while into the project, the creator disappeared. The rant mentions this and I’ll mention it too. He up and left, telling us we’d never see him again. To quote specifically:

“Well, so much for what scoundrel has and has not done. As of today, March 1st, 2001, I will no longer be able to continue development on Scoundrel. I’ll be disappearing from the face of the earth and will not be reachable. I will not go into the reasons behind this.”

Now that’s a short goodbye!

I am sure one day we might find out who did it, or not… but either way, I remember the “holy crap” aspect of Scoundrel’s appearance, and even though integration and interaction have become nearly standardized (and they call them “mashups” now, in between sips of diet cola), this one really blew me away, way back when. Truly, that’s all we can ask of scoundrels.

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