ASCII by Jason Scott

Trixter, that master of the truly old school IBM PC programming, has done it again. Already world-famous for his 8088 Corruption demo that put a type of full-motion video on an original IBM PC, has begun work on a music program. Big deal, your jaded mouth forms, but hear me out. He has made a music program that works with an IBM PC speaker.

The program is called MONOTONE, and after months of working, Trixter has finally come out with an alpha capable of both allowing input of music and playing it on the simple little barely-the-size-of-a-quarter PC internal speaker. Here’s his weblog entry on this marvel.

He’s begun making video entries about his work, so feel free to skip right here to his impressive demonstration of his little project:

In case you don’t have the time to listen to his presentation, be assured; he has written a music program for some of the most obscure objects sold to generate sound in the last 20 years. The Bank Street Music Card, for example, may not actually exist in anywhere but dreams at this point. The whole work is object-oriented, meaning he can add and remove modules within it as needed. He has set it up, in other words, to be an utterly flexible, utterly expandable work, while working on some of the simplest hardware from the dawn of the personal computer era. To prove his work, he shows a winning work from Blockparty last year and renders it on his program. And you can hear it.

MONOTONE is going to be amazing. How lucky we are to have people like Trixter working so hard to give old machinery new life.

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The longer I do stuff of a historical nature with computers, the more this puts me, ironically, in contact with people. And the more you end up in contact with people, the more you learn about people. The problem is, what if you don’t like what you learn?

I had an absolutely horrible English class with a teacher who had nothing but contempt for students. Her tirades drove me into books to read during class, and it was by luck that I found the story “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov. It’s over here and you might recognize it, or not. The upshot is that a young lawyer spends a lot of time learning about people and the more he does the less happy he is, until he renounces the bet he is involved in just to be rid of it.

This story was striking to me because at 13 I didn’t have any idea that increased knowledge could cause unhappiness; I was surrounded by so many people who were fighting to parade their ignorance that I assumed that in learning (as opposed to rote memorization) came pleasure, and I had stuck with that. And really, I continue to stick to that.

But age brings nuance and not everything ends up staying black and white, clean or dirty, all or none. For most of my young life I knew, just knew, that in any situation involving medical condition, that if there was a way for me to be kept alive, any means necessary, I would take it because of the utter void I knew awaited extinguishing. Now, I realize that there are conditions in which, ultimately, a lot of the reason for continued existence can be counterbalanced.

Anyway.

So after conducting hundreds of interviews, and in some cases spending months tracking down a story, I have this rough idea about reality in my head. I call it the three levels. It’s actually four, but I’ll explain that in a moment.

The first level is the “official story”. This is the story that people who do not care about history specifically usually have. George Washington was the first American president. The earth is round. Alexander Graham Bell discovered/invented the telephone, as did Edison the light bulb. There was a cold war and the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of it. The stories on this level are generally in the ballpark. If your job is not directly affected by knowing exactly who is Queen of England or how many city-states are in Asia, then you are a content little donut with the first level.

The second level is the “actual story”. This is not the actual story per se, but the story that is told to people who care a little more than those who know the first level. Typewriters certainly jammed, but the introduction of the standard qwerty keyboard over the previous formats is not necessarily because they jammed. The great videogame crash was certainly because of a glut of games, but also because of changes in the economy and investment. It is possible to read the output of wireless keyboards and decode them but why would anyone be doing that to you right now.

The third level is the objective observation, away from the writings and the witnesses and the stories and the lore. It’s what you get if you have a camera running on the situation or record things on tape, without going inside anyone’s head. This level has come more and more into prominence as of late. Don’t tase me, bro.

The fourth level, which I said sort of doesn’t exist, is the level you would get if you actually aimed the camera in the right direction and the camera was capable of recording thoughts, motivations, and situations from the past. With this magical camera, you’d really know what was up. We don’t have one of these cameras, although sometimes people will write books as if they have them, which really tends to piss the subjects of the books off.

So many times, I’ve encountered the first level during interviews. Occasionally the second. As rare as anything is the third. I never get the fourth.

Much of the discussion in web forums rests around the second level. We, the discussion group, know just enough to feel we’re worth debating it beyond the usual rubes. We can infer and bring together facts and cite sources and generally pontificate. Sometimes this is entertaining and sometimes it’s an explosion. But rarely, really, can you ever know what’s what. It comes down to who wins the debate, the argument, seems the least like a dick, and perseveres through the alternate opinions or contrarian onslaught.

The proliferation of multi-media availability means that more and more we face our actual selves recorded, doing what we did, with no real recourse for saying we didn’t do it or this was the way it really happened. Talented people are of course always working to say “it’s not what it looks like” but it certainly looks like it.

These three layers are in conflict with each other. You can shout until you’re blue in the face that the first level opinion is wrong, but you’re often countering it with your second level opinion, and you’re wrong too, buddy. Nobody, maybe not even the people involved, know of the full levels three and four. Maybe they do and choose to ignore it over time. The mind’s an amazing thing. It changes stuff. I’ve seen myself do it, I’ve seen others do it. Mid-interview. Mid-statement.

We spend so much time arguing, making our point, saying that we know the real story. My opinion, many interviews conducted later and much observation of writing later, is we find ourselves one level further than we’d like.

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Not every part of history is bright and cheerful, and some concepts which we think we’ve grown past are certainly still with us to the present day. In these cases, historical knowledge of the situation is even more disheartening than none at all. Nothing’s worse than knowing we’ve encountered a problem before, have dealt with the problem, and now the problem has optimized and made itself even more insidious and evil the next time around.

Many situations fall under this general description, but I speak today of the Ratio.

The Ratio in the BBS world was a symptom of the natural supply/demand balance, twisted to cover an economy where nothing had specific monetary value. On BBSes, the two most precious commodities meted out to users were connection time and access to files. The most precious commodity meted from users to the BBSes were message posts and uploads.

Each side of the battle, for it became a battle, fought to get what they wanted from the other side. To be sure, there were users who loved nothing more than uploading and posting, and you had definitely had sysops which adored providing lots of files to download and leaving the time to “unlimited”. But the vast majority swung the other way. Coming on, not posting, then downloading umpteen programs and disconnecting made you some sort of miscreant, an unwelcome cat thief in the home the sysop had set up. Conversely, the sysop who disallowed multiple downloads, who harangued and demanded his users post, was essentially a petty tyrant of a very, very small empire.

The ratio rose out of this, a solution which allowed the code to automatically determine who was welcome and who was not. It allowed the sysop to dictate how many files could be downloaded before the users had to upload. How many calls come come and go, scott free, before the non-communicative user had to post something, anything, in the message bases.

While the users could be laid some blame for not participating in the BBS’s life blood, its message bases and file areas, the resultant sense of force and brutal numbers that followed the institution of a ratio did little to bring warmth and truth to that board. The inherent flaw with this is that it’s a programming solution to a human problem. If you have to create a set of rules that represent an “ideal user” and then try to shoehorn all your people into it, you will end up alienating a lot of people you didn’t intend to, and keeping people you don’t want: folks so desperate for certain files, they’ll just hop through any amount of hoops to get them.

Exploring this concept further, I contend these approaches partially come with the heady rush of being a proprietor, of running a sort of concern or business with actual customers/users, even if they’re not specifically paying you with money. You’re in charge, you make the rules, you decide what’s what. It’s in that seat of power that you can bring your board to a new level, or crush it into a fascist ghost town. And if people, your people, start taking advantage of what you consider to be your good graces, then you end up instituting rules to keep them in line.

Nothing is more unreadable than a message posted under duress, an attempt to fulfil a ratio requirement and get back to downloading files. You’re shoved against the microphone, told to be witty, and only then will you get the meal you were promised. The short run seems to be what you wanted: a flood of messages. The long run reveals what you really got: a flood of crap.

I know all this because I’ve been at both ends of the situation. I have fought the leech and I have been the leech. I can defend both.

There is something magical in finding not just the tiny sliver of something you were looking for, but to find it couched in a complete collection, placed among all its brethren, with context and layout and the assurance that you’re looking at a pristine capture of it in its original state. It is natural to want all of this collection together, as you found it, ready to be held and treasured locally. You reach for the one file you can download, but the rest are held from you, deeper in the cell, and no amount of pressing against the bars will give it to you. It is a terrible feeling, and it is still happening.

Also, too, there is nothing worse than finding out that the number of calls to your BBS overnight were less than 3, because someone called again and again and pulled everything you had.

Even as we grow fat with additional resources of many times, richness where there once was poverty, we find new things we need to regulate, things that cost us dearly if given out freely. And then, once again, the ratio rears its head.

I have no solution, but the tenacity of the problem and how it has stayed in strong play to the modern day haunts me.

2 Comments

Yes, it’s real.

Hi Jason,
This looks well shot and edited.  I can tell you really care for the
people and their stories; it comes through in the way they address the
camera.
My only suggestion is that you might want to ease up on the dramatic
piano and slow-motion.  The tone you seem to be cultivating is pretty
similar to "King of Kong"--which is great; that was one of my favorite
films from last year.  But the thing about "King of Kong" is that the
director just let the people tell their own stories, and never tried
to wring any emotion out of their expressions or words that wasn't
truly there in that moment.  In my opinion, that's the role of a
documentarian: to make the feelings of the subjects in each moment as
clear as possible--nothing more, nothing less.  Keep the genuine
interaction (and add music where it's appropriate, of course), but
ditch the theatrics; that's my two cents.
I do understand, however, that this was a trailer, not the finished
film, and my overall impression is immensely positive.  I can't wait
to see the final cut.  I've been interested in this project since I
first read of it, and it's a thrill to finally see it coming together.

Keep them coming!

4 Comments

The next GET LAMP trailer is now out.

To get to the page with all the various versions of this trailer, just go to this page. It’s not linked from the main page yet, but will be. Until then, feel special and exclusive. There’s a good set of variant renders of this trailer, but be assured it’s all the same content.

I even have Flash and Youtube versions, and in the case of the YouTube one I use my new best friend Format 18 so that it looks pretty darn crisp and clean. I can almost forgive the tiny resolution when it’s rendered in this higher quality.

I call this the March 2008 trailer. Whereas the previous teaser trailer had almost no information, this one has slightly more, and a trailer that will likely come out within a week or two of the final release will have even more.

I hate when stuff can’t stand on their own and needs to be “introduced” by the creator, so I won’t discuss the content of the trailer here. I just ask you to check it out if you’re so inclined. I hope you enjoy it. I certainly have enjoyed putting it together.

Now, back to the workbench.

3 Comments

Some time ago, I mentioned I play Halo 3. I never played Halo or Halo 2, and I just happened to stumble into this thing, and I find it a relaxing side hobby, in between film renders and other stuff that makes me have to take a break for a while. I love logging in, getting into a game, and then hauling ass or having my ass handed back to me.

About 50% of the fun of the game is the game itself, and the rest of it is the social aspects that I like studying. The game has the ability of people all over the world to hear each others’ voices and interact quite a bit along the lines of shooting other people in the face, so there’s a lot of room for interesting interactions. Some of these are, of course, ugly.

When you play Halo 3, you get two scales of your achievements. One is your experience. The experience comes from playing games, grinding away. As you play more, your experience inevitably goes up. Maybe it’s a point a game, maybe a couple points, maybe zero points. But ultimately, it just climbs up, given enough games, regardless of your performance.

The other scale, however, is your skill level. This one’s a little stranger. If you win a lot, it goes up, but it doesn’t always go up, and sometimes it can go back down again, depending on your performance or your team’s performance. It initially goes up very fast (starts at 1, and you can end up with a score of 3-5 very quickly) but as the Skill number climbs, it will eventually sort of plateau out and it’s very difficult to go up in skill without just winning and winning, with no lost games.

Eventually, this combination of skill and experience will set your Rank. Your rank starts out at Recruit and goes along about 13 general Rank headings. Each of these Rank headings also have grades. So you can be a Grade 2 Lieutenant or a Grade 3 General, or whatever. More importantly, though, either increases of skill OR experience will increase your Rank. This means that if you play enough, you will gain rank, rising through the various levels as you go. Here’s my various ranks I’ve had.

Eventually, though, pure experience stops being too relevant a metric. You eventually have to raise your Skill level. This level is Captain.

Some time ago, I hit the maximum of what a person can do just through playing. Now, when I play with buddies or whatever, sometimes I win or sometimes I lose, but we have a good time. But since I’m not winning over and over, I am what’s called a “Staff Captain”, the highest level Captain you can be. It’s quite recognizable, with the three gold bars at the bottom.

Thanks for sitting through all this. Now for the interesting situation.

People fucking hate staff captains.

Being a staff captain means you are not a consistently winning player. You have not risen to sufficient skill in any variation of Halo 3, and you are a holding pattern, and therefore unpredictable.

And, with the additional bonus of people seeing Ranks when a group is assembled for a game, the insults come raining down. Nasty, nasty insults.

“Oh fuck, a staff captain. Jesus, why are you even playing this game? What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

This does not encourage the nicer aspects of my personality.

The question, of course, is where Bungie is in all of this. What they now have is a system that breeds a level of nastiness far and beyond mere pseudo-jingoistic team puffery. In game after game, I and others with the three gold bars get called all manner of sub-human, targeted and criticized by others, being told that because we haven’t taken the steps to specifically win a number of games in a row, we should get the hell out of Halo. Surely they can’t be delighted this is happening.

I’m sure there’s no way they knew it was going to end up being this way, that how the game was would trap a specific set of folks in a grinding situation with no easy escape, set up to be ridiculed consistently and nastily. I doubt they’re proud of it. If they are, they’re not the same style of programmers/designers I see in evidence elsewhere in the game, with its attempts to keep games fair, opportunities many, and variety the rule of the day.

How amazing just a few chosen parameters in their work would be the cause of so much ire.

6 Comments

Great news, depending on your definition of great.

As we head towards just a couple weeks before Blockparty, I’ve got the word we’ve got ourselves a brand new sponsor: Cocaine Energy Drink.

We’re being sent hundreds of cans. If you want to try out some Cocaine, Blockparty @ Notacon will be your place to go.

So, how do I reconcile this with my usual dislike of ads?

Mostly, the cocaine story is hilarious. A drink comes out that calls itself “Cocaine”. The Food and Drug Administration goes absolutely batshit. They move in and close the production of the drink down. The beverage company, instead of lying down, reads the shutdown notice, modifies the labeling, and comes out with Cocaine again.

Cocaine. It’s the pause that refreshes.

Anyway, I appreciate the help. Blockparty costs cash to put on, so why not help people enjoy more hours of it by pumping them full of energy drink? What can possibly go wrong?

If you are still on the fence about attending Blockparty, this is your time to make the right choice. Pre-registration is nearly closed. head over there and get your ticket.

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John Rescigno and I have no idea when the MUD/MUSH we started, TinyTIM, was actually “started”. We were certainly screwing around with the MUD program in late February and early March of 1990. We were both college sophmores (he at Clarkson University and I at Emerson College) and we were abusing an open account on the MIT AI Lab’s machine. A few years after we founded it, we decided to make, arbitrarily, March 18th 1990 the official “birthday” of this game.

It’s still around, 18 years later. It’s been though a half-dozen cities and many machines, and has been a lifetime of experience crushed into a simple C program.

It’s still up if you telnet to yay.tim.org port 5440. Someday, I will write about that place and all that happened. Not everyone will be happy when I do. But until that dark day, let’s focus on the good parts. So many friendships, so much love, so much greatness out of something that calls itself a game.

Happy Birthday.

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Uncle Kevin wrote another article recently that caught fire, mostly regarding a way of shifting value in an environment where digital duplication is the norm. Like his other article I mentioned, he doesn’t get all of it right but he throws into sharp focus for a percentage of the reading public some fundamental facts. I won’t sit around and go “I thought of this also”, because while I had given this some thought, I certainly don’t frame it like he does and people have been faced with this issue for a very long time.

Basically, what do you do when duplication is mostly free or no-cost, and you want to make bank? Well, you find qualities that can’t be duplicated easily and sell those.

Uncle Kevin culls out eight of these possible qualities. He calls them Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability. He then proceeds to come up with his own whack-ass definitions of each of these, so the words themselves are not as helpful but again, it’s the main thought that counts.

His version of Immediacy (the ability to get the stuff hot off the presses from the content people) is basically what I exploited/used for the BBS Documentary, selling pre-orders by the bucketful and ending up with something like 400-500 DVD sets ready to go out the door as soon as they arrived at my house. In fact, I ended up having to hand assemble these things to get them out quicker. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars of pre-ordering, so I took that stuff seriously. GET LAMP will have pre-ordering as well.

A bunch of his qualities are things most people don’t give a crap about; whether it came from the real place, whether it was set up for your specific needs, and so on. I focus more on the mercenary aspects; the BBS Documentary was 19 gigabytes of content. As I pointed out in one of my presentations, if someone is willing (especially in 2005) to duplicate 19 gigabytes of content, there was no way they were going to buy your stupid stuff from you. Chasing after them with a million honking bells and idiot laws is a wild goose chase. Let it go, man.

Anyway, so as I continue to brainstorm similar ideas along Kevin’s essay, I’ve been coming up with a few wild ideas, some which might stick around and some which will not. I am more and more enamored of a tier-based system, with crazy-deluxe on top and crazy-cheap on the bottom. By my very, very rough estimation, about ten times as many people downloaded the BBS Documentary as have bought it. It’s easy enough to make something downloadable; the question is what isn’t downloadable and people might wish to purchase/acquire?

So here’s my current favorite.

As part of buying the ultra-deluxe version, you get an e-mail address and a unique code. Before or after finishing the movie, you send me the code and your phone number and a good time.

And then I call you.

Is this a feature people would want? I don’t know. But it’s something I can offer as a feature that basically no-one else can. They can offer someone else to call, but not me. So you’re basically getting some time with me as part of your package. I know more than once I’ve seen a film and then tracked down a filmmaker to scream at/cheer at them about what I just saw. There are a percentage of folks who don’t need permission to decide to call someone up and rant/rave. But for a lot of folks, they don’t feel quite right just calling up. As part of this deluxe package, they most certainly would.

All optional, of course; you don’t have to call me, and I would laugh the laugh of a thousand suns if there was some sort of e-bay-like underground of traded Jason Scott Phone Codes from people selling off their unused ones. But for the people who are concerned about the “right” to call me, they would get it.

And no tears, either, a phrase I learned from the book Liar’s Poker. That means that if they want to scream at me for 20 minutes, they got the right. If someone wants to take half an hour to grill me on editing choices, so be it. If they want to ask me stupid non-sequitir phrases for a while, fine and fine. It won’t bother me; I’m doing a service that I’m selling.

I’m always thinking how to do stuff better or differently; this is just the latest one to kick up. I like it, in theory. How about you?

3 Comments

So some time ago, over a year ago really, it was announced that YouTube, that paragon of unbelievably shitty video and instantaneous access, that delightful example of “if you can’t be best be first” and “people will suck down anything if it’s free and quick”, was going to start improving the quality of the video on their site. Basically, they were going to have alternate higher-quality encodings and go back and make stuff look good, and so on.

Over time, this has trickled in and out of stuff, and I kind of forgot about it for a long while, but let me tell you, it’s starting to pay off.

I’m shooting in High Definition. I shot a music video in high-def and a documentary in high-def and let me tell you of the personal pain felt when I go to youtube versions of stuff I shot and it looks like a courtroom sketch artist got drunk and tried to animate my work using crayons. The widescreen gets squashed and the motion looks like poop and the sound is generally OK but only until you notice again how horrible the video is and then you kind of flip to another browser tab to ignore the travesty you’re seeing.

It turns out the option for turning on higher quality in a YouTube video is adding a “&fmt=18” at the end of the URL for a YouTube video. This says, basically “please to be not the sucking”.

I give you my MC Frontalot Music Video as a clear example:

BEFORE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

AFTER:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE&fmt=18

The differences are obvious and intense: better motion, use of widescreen, sharper images. Obviously it helps if the source video is not sucktastic, and in this case I know it’s not sucktastic. I do believe I will never link to a youtube video without &fmt=18 attached to the end ever again.

It’s nice when, in a rare display of the world working out, the dominant crappy thing becomes optionally less crappy.

6 Comments