ASCII by Jason Scott

This is a delightful salad of concepts, chopped up and presented for your perusal.

My buddy Chris and I have this running joke/theme going for the last months or so, where we send each other basic how-tos in each other’s field, his being writing and mine being filming. We also bump into a lot of how-tos in our own fields, just boppin’ around on the world wide web. A lot of them say the very same things, sometimes couched in humor, occasionally misstating them, and occasionally buying into ideas they themselves have obviously never tested. People often offer advice! It’s freely given and generally it doesn’t hurt to look them over. If you’re so unsure of yourself that someone giving you advice is a terrifying or despairing experience, you haven’t field-tested your methods enough. Don’t avoid work to hear advice, but don’t ignore advice because you think it’ll affect your work.

The upshot is we ping a lot of shit at each other.

So in my travels and thanks to Chris’ suggestions of places to check out, I’ve formulated this idea about creating “stuff” in the contemporary frame. I’ve been living this idea for years now, but I don’t articulate it often. I keep bumping into other people articulating it, so I figured it was my turn.

Robert Rodriguez got a bunch of fame because he shot his film Mariachi very cheaply, doing an unbelievably low ratio for shot footage and ending up with a flick that could rival a lot of low-budget Hollywood features. His secret was utterly abusing his crew/friends and instituting crazy risks and jumps towards making his film. It does not scale, but given what he was working with, it was very effective. Later, he’s gone on to make more films, notably shooting in digital format. In recent presentations about his digital work, Rodriguez mentions how he leaves the cameras running almost constantly during shooting, working stuff out with the actors and jamming the cameras all around to catch lots of stuff dynamically. In other words, his frugal footage style, this huge hallmark of his work, went right out the window at the first opportunity. Instead, he knew that digital footage is absolutely cheap and so he would just let stuff run constantly so he’d capture every last bit of his actors’ output – which itself is not cheap, so he was actually switching one overexploited scarce resource for another.

There’s a book I enjoyed reading called the DV Rebel’s Guide, which is done by one of the founders of an effects house. It’s a pleasant little read, although if you don’t edit on an Apple using Final Cut Pro with After Effects, his exacting technical walkthroughs aren’t overridingly useful to you. No mind; he often gives you advice that would work with an 8mm handheld film camera, so it’s worth browsing.

Specifically, he mentions how you are bursting, filled to the brim, really, with one resource that Hollywood just does not have: time. If you need to wait to the next rainfall for the best shot, you can. If you have to wait 3 months before that family vacation out west will enable you to get some good establishing vistas, fine. In one chapter, he mentions how a fire down the way from his home enabled him to round up his actors and shoot a scene out in front of the smoking building, giving a sense of realism to his film he could never afford. Shooting your film to take advantage of someone else’s terrible personal tragedy is morally reprehensible and I love it.

In these cases, you are looking at what you have at your disposal and exploiting it instead of bemoaning the lack of other advantages you don’t have. Winona Rider is not going to be 18 again and be the perfect girl for your role, and work for you for cheap. Another actress, however, one of many who would jump at an opportunity like what you want to work on, definitely will. You can’t shoot downtown and fire weapons. Shoot in a park and fire fake weapons and do sound effects later at your desktop.

This is all interesting but not where I am commenting today.

What has my interest is my theory that a lot of people get hung up on doing stuff because it was always done that way, and the way that their judgment works is that if they don’t do things in a similar fashion, they’re not valid. That’s a huge mouthful, and I think I can reduce it down to: stop doing unnecessary things. If the output of your effort has the same look, effect and result of doing it the old way, and a new way is easier, cheaper, or whatever, then do it the new way. There’s no shame in doing it the new way, and if someone is shaming you, they are lame and should go in a hole.

A concrete example. You can use a digital camera, of which there are ones so cheap they should come with a side of fries, and shoot stuff at a great resolution for animation. You click in a remote, which many come with, bind that camera in a tripod, and then shoot at a huge resolution that would be more at home on an HD screen than an iPod. And the feedback is instantaneous. You see right on the little screen that you’re shooting well, got the lighting right, got it in focus. There’s way to chop these little cameras so you can yank the pictures off as you go, too. Plug in the end of the USB camera, yank the newest shots you took, unplug, keep shooting. Why would you do this in 16mm film? Nostalgia? Because Will Vinton used to? Because that’s what your favorite animation was shot with? I shot that film I talked about earlier this month in 16mm. I would never, ever, ever do that again. There is no benefit. It is unnecessary.

It’s easy to focus on the small stuff and think you’re living with this philosophy. You used your buddy’s band for some music instead of paying insane rates for a similar-sounding band. You used a really good poem from the 18th century as a prologue instead of making one up. Not bad! But let’s take it out even further.

Why are people often making films as linear 1.3 hour narratives?

I mean, sometimes it makes sense to do this, but more frequently than not, you’re shooting the length because that’s what movie houses preferred/prefer to get more showings in a day. It’s a single piece because you can easily ship the film canisters around with numbers to indicate what reel should go when. Make no mistake, I find technical film aspects fascinating. I was even trained in some, but it is utterly unnecessary now. This was the genius of Pete Chvany, my college film mentor; his lessons still work for me even when the medium has completely changed. Good is good!

BBS Documentary was seven hours of content, 5.5 of that film episodes. There were another few hours of audio recordings too. GET LAMP may, in the aggregate, end up rivaling BBS Documentary for the amount of content you get within the final product. There’ll be a main “film” but I already know of three “featurettes” (really, shorter episodes) accompanying it. The work will exploit the DVD format for multi-angle, subtitles, menus, and interactivity. Why not? I’m already there, I’m already making this work available in DVD, there’s no reason not to.

I am not pursuing film festivals because I don’t see any point. I suppose I could prowl around a few with my film being shown and enjoy things that way, but there’s not an overriding reason for me to do so. Various events have asked me to show a film and accompany the showings. I will do that, since I get the benefits of travel and meeting people without looking at everyone I meet who has any success as a “get”. The medium of film festivals, that is, a meat market where you often pay money for the hope that some big names will find your film and watch it and give you a gabillion bucks, is not something I see being relevant for the things I do. GET LAMP has several rough goals that I hope happen:

• People who have never heard of text adventures will be interested in this film.
• People who make or play text adventures will feel good about the film.
• The final product will take the average person a week of effort (40 hours) to fully regard.
• That average person could just see just a small bit of that and still be satisfied.

None of these is particularly impossible; I am leveraging my obsessiveness and regard for the subject and not getting hung up on being just like a film I might have seen in the theater in the last week. We’re different things and we each can do what we do well enough; why waste our talents trying to be like the other?

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An occasional surprise or insight has come out of my interviews for GET LAMP that’s unlikely to get the amount of depth it deserves in the final work. I could be wrong and it’ll be prominent, but let’s assume for today’s entry that this isn’t the case. I’d like to talk a little bit about feelies, but specifically, the Feelie that started it all, which appears to be Murder Off Miami.

To explain what I mean by “Feelies” in this context: Infocom packaging (and really, a bunch of other software packages of the 1980s era) came with additional knick-knacks wrapped in, accompanying the disk or cassette and the manual. Sometimes these knick-knacks were simply copy protection items, like a code wheel or a map with information you’d need to refer to to go far enough in the game. Other times, they were neat stuff that provided you with an additional dimension to the game. I’ve interviewed a lot of people who have said this was what set an Infocom game ahead of other similar products for them; you opened the box, and stuff fell out, and even before you played the game you were part of the game, if that makes sense.

There are exhaustive galleries of all the contents of the Infocom boxes; they range from plastic rocks to a map with pieces to Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (always opaque).

The term “Feelies” harkens back to the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which was his term for a movie which provided tactile feedback. In other words, it could be claimed that the Infocom games were providing tactile feedback in each game with stuff you could hold in your hand while playing. I should mention this term was not 100% beloved within Infocom, but it has persisted and everyone at least knows what you’re talking about.

And what else I found out was that nearly everyone I talked to who had something to do with Infocom’s feelies had owned or knew of this interesting property, Murder Off Miami, which had originally been published in… 1936.

1936! Of course, that’s not the edition that everyone owned at the time of the dawn of Infocom… they owned the 1979 re-issue, which did its best to recreate the original work. This was, in fact, an edition I owned myself, because my dad got it for his kids and we did our best to honestly solve the mystery within.

The “book” was basically a bound folio, with what seemed to be a massive sheaf of papers inside, including photos, maps, telegrams and even pieces of evidence like hair. You were basically being given the “case file” of a sensational murder case, and as you browsed through the writings and clues, you were to come to the conclusion of who committed the murder and why, and at the end you would open a sealed portion of the book to see if your answer was correct.

It’s very well done. Here’s some shots of the inside:

You might imagine the feeling, especially as a youth, opening this treasure trove of items to pick through, this pile of evidence towards a crime that might help you solve a case, and there’s really no narrative in the strictest sense. Stuff is happening and there’s dates, and some of the essays within this collection read like prefaces, but generally we’re talking a big non-linear story. Right at home, one might say, with the sort of interactivity the later computer games would display.

As an adult you would likely recognize this for what it is, a fulfillment nightmare. Trying to imagine how much it cost to put together this collection of oddly-shaped items, bound by a string, means you really get a sense for how out of this world this thing was. There are a variety of websites describing the process of putting this item together, this one being the best. You really understand what a monumental undertaking and risk this was.

I must also stress, this item is worth getting, still. You can go to Amazon and pick up a used copy elsewhere, and you can read this thing and it will still have the same punch, 70 years after its initial creation.

The impression I got from the Infocommies was that this book was a real eye-opener of what “could” be done in printing. While the industry moved from the baggie-and-disk approach and did some basic cardboard printing, Infocom shot ahead with their package design, including the Starcross saucer and the Suspended plastic mask, and all the feelies inside. And it all comes back to this odd little book and its 1970s reprinting.

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I’ve been tapped to speak at ROFLcon.

ROFLcon’s one of those ideas that is either going to be a spectacular one of a kind event or a complete mess; either way it does promise to be utterly memorable. The premise is simple; assemble a bunch of “Internet Memes” and see what happens. Have some talks so there’s something to do. Tailor it in a pleasant academic cloth so sociologists and cultural anthropologists can get out of their boxes for some air, and make sure there’s adequate bathrooms.

The guest list reads like a laundry list of fads of the last few years, but more pressingly, includes some heavy hitters in the realm of online content generation, the first set of people making it their full-time primary source of income and outlet to be a website. Some of them are friends, other colleagues that have written about me or me about them or otherwise. Many, many are not. I am famous in some small sector of life; others here are famous too, in differing sizes and amounts. Pretty much all can buy groceries without being hassled, which is my metric for “comfortable celebrity”. Some discussion was underway for me to record some interviews with people, maybe chat with a few; I don’t know how realistic this will be but it’s possibly there. I would think endless cellphone snapshots wouldn’t do this assemblage justice.

My talk is called “Before the LOL” and will function as a historical context to Internet Memes. I’m sure it’ll be adored by some and questioned by others, but at least my concern I raised some time ago about history being regarded for this is being nicely addressed in my favorite way: “OK, Captain Fingerwag, YOU steer.”

ROFLcon descends to Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 25th and 26th. I predict it will be a hot ticket indeed.

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This little gem got contributed to me this week: a recording of people screwing around on a phone conference in 1987, doing a little ditty called the Modem Man Rap. Here’s the 866k mp3 file.

I figured I’d transcribe the greatness for you.

All right, take it from the top…. the Modem Man Rap

Yo my name is Modem Man and I’m K-Kool
But some people think I’m one big fool
I hack out Sprint and ITT
Wherever I go I make calls for free

All the kids call my phreaky phone line
And get the new codes all the time
Here is an Allnet for you
It’s 5163452
Tell me if it works, cause I don’t know
‘Cause it was hacked out by the Toad

In case you haven’t heard the news
Magnus got busted he’s one dumb dude
He hacked out 90 codes from MCI
And knocking down the door came the FBI
They busted in his door the very next day
Took his crystal ball and his brand new Hayes
They got all his numbers and even his loops
So he jumped on the phone and called Zarniwoop!

Word man, word man, that was bad, word

My name is Style, and I am fine
So call me on the other line
Style, please get off the phone
So your little sister can call home
Please go use the other line
But don’t be long, it’s dinner time
Better yet, go clean your room
And don’t forget to use the broom
I’m going to unplug your BBS
If you don’t start cleaning up this mess

Listen guys, I got to jam
Dinner’s ready, and we’re having spam
Too bad, cuz I’m having a ball
I just love conference calls

I’ll repair the gaps and mistakes if the original contributor gives me corrections, or others help me out with them. I did my best.

Notably, this 1987 rap calls into question a whole discussion that I got yanked into recently over the origins of “woot”. Obviously this rapper uses “Woot” within the same context that many people online do 3-4 years later, even explicitly rhyming it with “loot”. I doubt this was the origin for it, but at least it brings another artifact to the table. An Update: I am wrong, and it’s been corrected to reflect that.

The rap, now twenty years old, mentions a few pieces of phreak/hack history worth noting. It mentions having an Allnet, which was one of the also-ran phone companies. I’m going to use a paragraph from elsewhere to describe it:

“One of the first independents out of the gate after the 1984 breakup of AT&T, Allnet Communication Services was once the fourth-largest long-distance provider in the US. The product of a merger between Chicago-based Allnet and Detroit-based Lexitel, Allnet stood apart from its competition by being the first major player to lease its network infrastructure rather than purchase soon-outdated equipment. While AT&T and MCI employed analog microwave (the hissy long-distance that we remember as kids), Allnet leased digital microwave and fiber from other players, resulting in clearer calls and more network flexibility. Despite this technical superiority, Allnet got dinged frequently on its customer service, which seemed to suffer from high turnover and low consistency. Allnet was acquired by Frontier Communications in 1995. ” [1]

By the way, the 10xxx code for Allnet was 10444. When the rapper mentions Allnet “codes”, what he means is you would call Allnet’s access numbers (because using a 10xxx number would bill the phone you calling from), and then you’d type in a numeric code to charge it to your account. This way, you could use your account to call from anywhere in the country…. and so could others!

Also notable is the use of “K-Kool”, which is well in use at this point in history, accompanying the still-in-vogue K-Rad as a tech slang term. However, nobody appears to still use the term “Got to jam” to mean “I have to leave now.”

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About a year ago, I told you I was starting a new exercise regimen. And that I did! Man did I work out.

Here we are a year later, and I didn’t go to the gym, mostly, for the last 3 months.

So, am I slacker? Well, no. My gout and kidney stones increased to the point that walking became difficult. Very difficult. I missed quite a few productive days to it. And if you can’t walk, you can’t work out very easily.

I now have an appointment with a sleep lab (to see if I’m sleeping properly), an allergist (to see if my environment is trying to kill me more than usual) and I’m on a new regimen of pills.

As soon as I’m better generally, I will be back at the gym regularly, and hopefully looking better. If you see any photos of me from Shmoocon, it looks like I had a backslide with Kirstie Alley over the winter; not the case. I’m just sick.

And knowing you’re sick and being willing to treat it appears to one the major hurdles to overcome.

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Another great shmoocon. Attendance was highest ever, the location within the hotel had been recently built, and the competency and brilliance shine all throughout the event. It skews professional, but I can live with that for the great times and opportunities it gives.

I took almost no photos this time around, sadly; I just didn’t focus on that. I suspect there will be plenty of photo albums to browse shortly, if not already. You really have a choice of being an attendee or photographer when you whip out the camera, and I chose attendee.

I reconnected with a bunch of people; I’ve given up being able to guess what people thought of me. Hero? Chatterbox? Freakjob? Leech? I’m sure everyone’s got some good opinion. The hak5 crew was especially forgiving of my endless monologues stepping into their area; for my own part I was impressed with how they’ve put together a show and crew. I was on a crazy live streamed thing they did on Friday night, and I have no idea how that went.

My talk went well. I didn’t have a single note written down; I knew the big challenge would be to fit it all into an hour presentation, not having to arrange the meager contents to fill the slot. I covered caving, the movies I make, the culture I spent some time with, and some of the footage I shot. Responses have been positive; I don’t know if we actually get the Talk Review scores they had people fill out.

All in all, a great time. I expect by next year my health will be back to where it’ll be 72 solid hours of Shmoo. I can only hope.

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I’ve been mentioning Peter Hirschberg and his arcade for some time now, as well as his other projects. All positively, I might add. And by positively, I’m using that as a shortcut for “drooling incessantly over how much style he exudes in everything he does”. It’s really just a great thing to know guys like this are in the world.

So during my planning for Shmoocon, I realized that I’d be relatively nearby where his arcade is, and that, with my rental car, I could probably go there and back without too much trouble. So I brought this up with Peter and he was all for it.

In doing this, I had to sacrifice a little bit of my time at Shmoocon; a real shame, because I really do enjoy these things. But come on, I’ve been following this guy for a decade and here was my big chance to meet him for the first time, as well as see in person his big project. So grabbing a few random attendees (Dan and Nick), we set out for the sixty-or-so-mile trip out West to where Luna City is.

Something’s definitely up with me, energy-wise, so Nick ended up having to drive a bit of it. (Additionally, on the way back, everyone got to see me tiredly swerve in a highway, so it was thrills all around). We got there around 8pm, and wouldn’t you know, Peter and his wife had the whole thing up and running beautifully to greet us.

As promised, I bought my collection of vintage quarters, which Peter is of course loathe to go down the road of. He is just as likely to go for adding tokens, so that people not only can play the games and he doesn’t have to worry about stuff, but they could be souvenirs for their time spent at Luna City.

And make no mistake, Luna City is the sort of place you carry memories of for some time afterwards. It’s almost a temple, a place of worship, for arcade games. It’s the cleanest, nicest arcade you’ve ever been in, because it’s been created from the ground up on the template of all the classic 1970s and 1980s arcades that flourished around video games and pinball machines. It’s futuristic, yet of the past. It is otherworldly, yet as familiar as a favorite dream. Peter and I discussed this place for a while, and I think what I was trying to get across was how for many people out there, he’s achieved their dream too. In other words, the fact that someone, somewhere, did this represents for others a vicarious triumph of their own dream. A lot of people wanted something like this, and he did it.

I forsee myself coming back many times, if only to get better pictures! The ones I took were sub-par, mostly me playing around a bit when not talking to Peter (we had a decade to catch up on, after all) or playing a few games. It’s been a long time since I touched a working Space Wars cabinet, and Peter indulged me a few games. In fact, the last time I’d touched a Space Wars was 1979!

This City has a great future. Feel free to browse my uneven photo album that I took there.

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On January 16, 1978, Ward Christensen started his Monday trying to dig himself out of a snowstorm. Unable to successfully do so to commute out to his job as an IBM sales engineer, he went back inside and talked to his friend Randy Suess, a fellow member of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange. Ward had been on an Arpanet-based mailing list where it had been postulated that these new modems and a kit computer could be combined to make some sort of computer answering machine. Nobody, however, had sat down and actually done it. Ward and Randy cooked up an idea to make one of these computer answering machines/bulletin boards as a project. Having previously come up with the XMODEM protocol for transferring binary files dependably over modems, Ward was just the guy to get cracking on it, and Randy, a tech and chip geek, was just the the guy to build the hardware it’d run on. Ward started on the code and Randy the hardware, and within a few days they had a rough prototype. By two weeks, it was working enough to let people test it, and 312-545-8086 got you the first Computerized Bulletin Board System, CBBS.

As Ward mentioned in his interview when I visited him in 2002, testing continued for some time, and since they didn’t think anyone would believe they got it running in two weeks, they made it four, and ever since then the official birthday/anniversary of the first Bulletin Board System is February 16th, 1978.

30 years ago today.

Bear in mind that in 1978 there weren’t many auto-answering modems; this was a time when Ward had a second trash can in his office, to put on top of the acoustic coupler modem so that ambient room noise wouldn’t corrupt the data. The solution to auto-answering was this: a ring detect circuit built by Randy would reset the machine, making it restart and run the CBBS program, which would then pick up the phone. Time from machine reset to blasting a carrier down the line: two rings.

In a stroke of luck, the first BBS was attached to a line printer so that Ward could do bug-fixing and see how the BBS was running. These thermal paper rolls, records of the first few months of the first BBS, have been entrusted to my care for now and I’ve been transcribing them. You can actually browse these scrolls now. I have a bunch to finish. I think I should make them a priority…

CBBS as a board went down in the 1990s. A version of it is online as a webforum. Ward started running his own BBS, the Ward Board, for a number of years; it has also gone down but he was kind enough to give me some samples of the last years of that BBS.

Both men have been “done” with the whole BBS thing for many years; they haven’t talked in a long time. But Randy was kind enough to sit for an interview and Ward has been really gracious over the years in getting me artifacts and discussing it and helping people with their questions about it. There’s something surreal about the co-creator of the BBS posting on Slashdot but that’s what happens when we go from amoeba to alpha centauri in a couple generations.

Their story and the story of what happened to their creation is why I picked up my camera and started booking flights, and for that I thank them very much. How lucky we are that both these gentlemen still walk the earth and have seen what has happened to their side project, so long ago.

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The refreshing cascade of new faces to the weblog over the last week have reminded me of all the ways online communication enables us to not just interact, but hate remotely.

I had forgotten, I guess, how easy it is for people to take a few quick glances at some data and shove their two-line thesis out the door. Or to then proceed to make even more conclusions based on this thesis. And then, how easily it is for this quarter-baked half-thesis to become an addendum to the original data, as if, you know, they deserved it.

Every time I think about changing the retro-yet-lively white-on-black color scheme the weblog has, I get one of these high-popularity commentaries that includes people saying how much their eyes hurt, or I’m an incompetent webmaster, or that they couldn’t finish reading, and my natural reaction is to leave it so. Suddenly, it’s not a point of discussion, but a warning that one of my weblog entries has broken a tad wide and the tourists have arrived.

I like nothing more than to browse people who have no idea who or what the hell I am, what I’ve done, what I’m doing, or any other data points, and then just make all these great conclusions about me. It’s refreshing. They’re neither friend nor foe. They’re just observers, as so much of this medium turns us into.

On the other hand, objectivity never means that you’re necessarily informed, just that you’re lacking direct hanging-with-me biases. So that comes into the mix as well.

I don’t write this weblog to garner hits, otherwise I’d apparently goatse random people all the time, write incendiary text about others’ works, and offer free PDFs forever. I’ll stick with what’s on my mind, and what’s on my mind is this: it’s a pretty big world out there, and while we may think that piloting our amazing browser-mobile over the web’s landscape makes us experts about it, it really doesn’t.

Here’s to unexpected and unexplored terrain.

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Someone on the site Reddit linked to a story where someone threatened a site legally for removing an image that he was hotlinking. Someone quickly wrote “THAT’s not hotlinking, THIS is hotlinking” and linked to the entry about hotlinking I wrote in the first days of 2007. Someone else was taken enough by this to then make this weblog entry a story of its own on Reddit, and suddenly it shot up the charts. Again.

I’ve been through many Slashdottings, Diggs, and BoingBoings, and I don’t recall this level of pain before. To wit:

That’s a T-1 line maxing out. Serving a blog entry. All day. Happy Valentine’s Day!

In all, 35,000 people have visited me today. A few were around to get my opinion on videogame documentaries, but others have apparently learned for the first time my little tale of an unforgettable anus seared into the minds of hundreds of thousands.

I think the goatse story is timeless, so I don’t really go “dude, that’s so old” if people link to it. I write a lot of the entries to be unrelated to the moment, and apparently this one has the qualities people look for. That is, a butt.

Anyway, excuse me… I’m going to go throw an icepack on the machine.

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