ASCII by Jason Scott

If you’ve not heard of it before, there’s a “web feature” out there called “Zero Punctuation”. It’s basically a once-a-week video segment from a fellow named Yahtzee, who wrote a few adventures but is also, apparently, blessed with one of the best wits in the universe.

You don’t need to have played these games he talks about in his segments; you possibly don’t need to have played many video games at all. Instead he whips up, regularly, a beautiful and damning blend of biting sarcasm, deep cuts, and soaring highs into a five-minute animatic that leaves you truly breathless.

It is so good, it’s worth starting from the very beginning (an attack on the Sony game Heavenly Sword) and playing each segment twice to see all the details. He does one of my favorite narrative tricks, saying one thing but showing another and having the two points blend into an even funnier third point. That kind of work is rare these days and Yahtzee does it in episode after episode.

You even get to one of my favorite situations, where something goes by and it’s so clever that you end up pondering it, and by that time he’s made two more points and you’re desperately trying to keep up and you fail, forcing a restart from a few seconds before the first point. That’s not annoying, that’s breathtaking. Keep up, kiddo.

The episodes have a really annoying ad banner on them that you need to dispel and which doesn’t entirely go away, but even with that little lameness, the brilliance of the work shines through. Bravo.

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10 years ago, I ran an anonymous remailer.

Before I explain it, let me show you the insanely pissed-off message I wrote when I closed it:

*** IMPORTANT NEWS REGARDING HAYSTACK@HOLY.COW.NET ***

– The Haystack Administration.

If that thing makes no sense, that’s fine. I’ll quickly explain it, along with a decade-past perspective on it.

So, way back when on the Internet, people were terrified. By “people”, I mean “White College-Educated Libertarians” and by Internet I mean “The somewhat closed-off-but-with-more-and-more-people-coming network” and by terrified I mean “terrified”.

Anybody who used the Internet for any amount of time knew that there was a good thing going on. You could connect all over the world, you had instantaneous connections, and you had a burst of free speech and transfer of information unlike anything the world had seen. This was what was so cool: you couldn’t over-exaggerate how fucking great it was. You would run out of superlatives before you ran out of Internet.

But part of what made it cool was that it was so free-feeling. Your little favorite idea or fetish, lambasted and marginalized in the world, could flourish and make its own space. Someone could say “fuck” as easily as they said “hello”, and it was all sorts of rough and tumble. This was heady, heady stuff. And there was, therefore, a terrified feeling that it was all going to go away.

Bad things happened back then, and still do. Laws were discussed and proposed that would ruin things. Policy fucks and law fucks and library fucks and academic fucks, all were slowly creeping into some massive shit-ball of dreary clampdown onslaught that was going to take this great Internet out and shoot it.

Bear in mind, of course, I mean the Internet between 1988 and 1995. There was a different Internet before that and a different Internet after that. But thanks to magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000 and all the Ziff-Davis crapshoots, there was this belief that the Internet had, by the early 1990s, achieved a manifest destiny of freedom and wonder that would be unsurpassed in our lifetimes and oh fuck here comes a law.

So in response, people started pushing ways to protect themselves against government and prying eyes and despicable boring people and all the general what-about-the-children types. One way was cryptography and another was anonymity.

Cryptography’s its own mess, but you basically could send pretty-likely-to-be-protected messages, between others, and even more importantly, could generate a hash table indicating that you were receiving an unmolested message, untouched by the government agents who were out to get your crap and make you look bad. If I’m making it sound like a touch of paranoia, well hells yes, this was paranoia. Not your garden variety paranoia with the slight unease of materials and natures you didn’t comprehend, but the even worse paranoia where you knew full well that people were entirely capable of doing crazy monitoring and life-destroying things to you and succeed. So you were paranoid, with some good reason.

Anonymity is the idea that people aren’t free unless you don’t know who they are. Otherwise, they are targets for reprisal, attacks, and general squashing of their ideas and lives. It is, one might say, a necessary vitamin strengthening the body of conversation and knowledge. If people can’t feel they won’t be targeted and pilloried for their statements, the ones they make will be hopelessly crippled and gaunt, lacking in the full force of ideas, like when you say the words ass flap while anonymous and aren’t poked with a stick. Very important, anonymity.

Whoever knew the right people got into Wired magazine and one of the groups who knew someone who knew someone was the “Cypherpunks”, their name a play off “Cyberpunks”, which was dedicated to strong cryptography and a host of other platforms I’m entirely at a loss to recall. Here’s Steven Levy’s big wet kiss to this organization, which is probably the main driving force that I can even remember them. Note that this is the second issue of Wired ever.

So I myself, being a rather young fellow at the time, was totally taken in by these lofty ideals. Promoting freedom and cryptography and anonymity was on my “will do when I can” list that stayed rather dormant through the years when I actually stopped being able to afford to eat regularly. I knew I would one day get regular meals and also be in a position to provide some sort of blow of these cypherpunkish ideals and the rest.

As it turned out, I got the position before I got the regular meals.

The position was running COW.NET, my totally off-the-wall what-the-hell internet service provider I ran from 1995-1998 as a for-profit entity before kicking out of that entirely. I will, more properly, write entries about cow.net’s South Boston period (as opposed to its Quincy period, Medford Period and other Periods) but now let’s dial back to the whole remailer thing.

Cow.net ran on some aging Sun 3/280s. These Suns had cost a bank and an airline $20,000 when they were bought, and I’d paid $300-$500 for them. One of them had come from X.ORG, actually, and I was slow in paying them (SEE: NOT EATING), and they had a whopping 30mhz CPU and 32megs of memory and pushed something like 15-20 amps. Huge, horrible things. And they were connected to the net by a 56k connection. Note, not a modem; a dedicated dropped-in telco line going to an RSU/DSU and the whole expectation we have today with a network room. This cost me roughly $500 a month. It was in a weird location and I was starving and people weren’t buying accounts as fast as I’d have liked but damnit, I was doing it!

So there I was in my position, and I thought I’d better make good on my promises to myself. So I put up an anonymous remailer.

A remailer (in my case, the software was called “mixmaster”) was a program where you could send out e-mail through an e-mail address, which would strip the headers, hold it for a random bit of time, and then blow it out into the world, or another remailer. Eventually, this message would make its way into the world, either posted on a newsgroup or in someone’s e-mail box, and there’d be no way to really trace where it came from.

This is all in theory, of course. Someone who was particularly paranoid could point out that I might be a federal agent, or my lines could be tapped, or someone could hack the box, or …. you know, good solid theoretical breaches. So people would often “chain” remailer stuff, bouncing a message between them, or sending them from anonymous-as-it-could-get-back-then connections and so on. In this way, your precious message and anonymity would be preserved.

What kind of messages would go through?

Oh, it ranged. I know of companies that would give my remailer e-mail address with instructions, so employees could honestly make anonymous suggestions. I know of people who used it to post messages about their medical experience as a doctor without revealing who they were. (Privacy to exploit privacy!) I know of people who threatened each other’s lives….

…oh, did I mention that? See, anything could happen, so naturally folks were assholes. I had someone use the remailer to tell someone that when he gave that speech this Friday, he’d be on a roof with a sniper rifle. I asked my friends what to do, and they suggested “wait until Saturday”. I did. Nobody died.

But this is the crunching-bone reality of these pie in the sky implementations of positive-outlook human interactions: just a dash of dumbass and many come crashing down. Relying on goodwill or a stern talking-to/indication of disappointment upon your shiny new tool being used to poke someone in the eye…. well, it’s what the kids call “full of fail”. You end up with a certain percentage of ass and eventually the ass minority becomes the ass majority and then you are trapped in ass.

So somewhere a year in, I gave up. My machine was being overused by all this, my connection (remember, 56k) was being hosed, and I was being consistently beat up for my actions, those kind of numb-nut rants that only a truly self-righteous somewhat-wronged individual can conceive of. I saw the writing on the wall.

But I’d done the good fight; haystack@holy.cow.net was a heck of a cool e-mail address, the theme of “you are the needle” was clever and in line with the “be revolutionary and fun” idealism I sucked down with a side of fries, and most importantly, I was not sued or arrested.

You can actually do a search to see some of the many fine postings used by the service over the year.

Would I do it again? Oh, likely. I do have ideals of doing the “right thing”, even if it gets a screwdriver in my nose. But either way, I won’t forget my lessons learned anytime soon.

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Driving from San Francisco to San Diego to Seattle and back to San Francisco is a lot harder than I remembered.

It’s something like 3,500 miles in total, including waylaid stops and additional sideways driving as needed for interviews. This 3,500 miles, conducted as it was over eight days, resulted in six interviews. (I also spent some time with close friends both in LA and Seattle, as a bonus). By the time you get past 1,000 miles of driving alone, you start to go a little nuts. I used to be much better at this, and I can still do long drives, but the long drives coupled with interview considerations and the weight of getting good shots is becoming a bit much. I am getting old, sadly. I can’t do this to myself over and over, even if I never spent any time in my twenties doing insane driving like this.

I suspect next time I’ll rent an RV.

In this brilliant idea of mine, I rent an RV and bring friends. One of us is driving and we never get to the sleepy stage, taking 3-4 hour shifts and then the others get to rest or hang out. The time of all this travel allows work to be done in other quarters, to plan, or just to sleep. It takes some getting used to, putting your life in someone else’s hands for many miles, but the alternative is putting my life in my own hands and trying to break the 400 mile mark in a single shot.

Work on GET LAMP has now completely overshadowed the Arcade Documentary, so until it’s done I’m not working much on Arcade. (A lot of work has been done but much more is left to do.) I’m sure I’ll be able to find people with the stated goal of “We will drive around the country and see or talk about Arcades”. It’s a good pitch, that.

Who wants in!

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So, I spoke at Google.

This was one of my dreams, actually; to at least walk through Google at its heyday, to see the thing myself so I could remember what it was like in years to come. No entity, none, lasts forever in the state it is, and whether Google has peaked already or merely will be going through a bunch of Apple-like morphings remains to be seen. Either way, something big is there and I wanted to see it for myself.

To this end, a friend invited me on campus to speak about Wikipedia. Now, I’d made a little promise to myself that the next time I’d ever speak on stage about Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales would be on stage with me. But still, this was an opportunity too good to pass up. So I agreed, and gave a few paragraphs of text on what I’d speak about, and then continued doing interviews for GET LAMP. I cleared that particular Google Day of all interviews, though, just to be sure.

I signed a non-disclosure agreement and I’m going to honor it, so I won’t discuss the things I saw in anything but a general sense. But I will say that my expectations were exceeded as to how wonderful things were, both as a spectacle and as someone who has spent many hours studying and discussing corporate culture.

I spent time, as part of my dad’s desperate moves to be able to handle full visitation rights and keep a job, at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Westchester County, New York. This was, by most standards of a young boy, an amazing place. The curving architecture was out of this world, the hallways going for what seemed like infinity (I’d walk/run the length of them for fun) and insane machinery likely designed to pluck eyes from aliens scattered throughout. It was also where I met David Chess, albeit through a constricted tour no doubt forced upon him because my dad was a manager. But David was inspiring in his own way, with his great programming and cool office with a bunch of screens and magic going on. David’s example became a part of what I hoped to be. And did.

But all of the magic of the IBM research center pales to the now-revised life at a place like Google, still brimming with untold amounts of cash and a whole range of ideas about office life, architecture, activity and approach. It was as I’d dreamed it’d be, and that places like this exist on Earth and not just in dreams makes me happy. I’ve had actual, real dreams of working at a place like Google, going back many years before a Google existed.

There was a feeling in the halls, that’s hard to describe, but basically one of assured expectation. That is, a feeling that of course amazing things happen here, because this is a place where amazing things are expected to happen. It is a place where you are not fighting for resources in the same way that other places do. In some of my jobs, I have received blowback and horror at my request for a paper shredder. Not so at Google. My buddy RaD Man came with me to the presentation, and a person who’d once done art for RaD Man bumped into us in a lounge area. His reaction, and this gets to the heart of it, was not “Oh my goodness, my old buddy RaD Man is here”, but “Oh, hey, and today’s interesting thing of coolness was that RaD Man is here.” That is very precious, that feeling. It does not happen often.

Also, and this is a somewhat unusual but not disturbing feeling… I just don’t feel smart or driven enough to work there. I think I’d like working there, if I lived in California, but I can’t think of a single reason to hire me. I remember when they brought an original Google cluster to the vintage computer festival, partly as a recruiting tool, and I said to the guy there, “You ought to hire someone to archive history of the company.” He then took out his card, showing that he was, in fact, listed as a “Google Historian”. Oh well.

So I gave a talk on Wikipedia, which you’ve no doubt heard the content in various forms before, although I’ll post the speech itself in the future. I covered the usual items, but geared it for the Google audience. This mostly consisted of not getting hung up on criticisms of specific current choices in Wikipedia but instead how the environment it set up causes certain trends and issues which a place like Google, as it moves more into user-controlled content and presentation, needs to think about.

This talk was also unusual for me because I actually had something up on the screen. In this case, it was a series of cards with simple text headers on it. But you know, it totally fucked me up. My timing was affected by them, and I diagnosed, about halfway through, how to fix this for the next time I do such an approach. So maybe I’ll have more visual aids in the future, or maybe I’ll stick with my usual just-me technique, which has worked well so far.

Someone asked me what it was like, this place of Google and this was the best I could come up with:

“It’s like Mount Olympus having rough sex with a Rubik’s Cube factory and knocking over a Whole Foods Supermarket.”

Take from that what you will.

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A muffin is a muffin. You like it or you don’t like it. But there’s not much to the muffin beyond it being a muffin.

Now, if that same muffin is being eaten by someone who is keeping you captive and they have declared that you will be slaughtered when they finish the muffin, then the muffin takes on a whole other nature.

The muffin is a measurement of time. It’s an indication of a scary end. It’s also a combination of hilarity and terror as you realize that the bastard is actually enjoying this muffin as it makes your demise. You have, in other words, a whole range and spectrum of feelings about the muffin, far outside of the muffin-esque aspects of its nature.

I bring this odd idea up just to help understand an even odder idea.

A lot of my work is collecting artifacts. But that’s just what they are… artifacts. Representations of activity. A program or .ZIP file represents not only the work that appears in it but the work that has gone into that project, over time, of which you are getting the most recent revision as of the time of the ZIP file. You lack the revisions now gone, the letters written, the phone calls made over pizza, the hours of walking and talking (possibly alone) and all the rest of that critical, human interaction.

A lot of the games I play on my XBOX become a dozen times more compelling with the addition of people. The interaction is not just in a matter of the words they say but the style with which they play and the actions they take both inside and outside the game well away from the base “rules”, which are “get a point for killing, most points win”. It is the difference between a cup of water and an empty cup.

This human interface aspect, being transient and ethereal, is one of the first things lost in collecting artifacts. You can have a program but not really understand the programmer. You can have a BBS but not know the voice of the Sysop.

This is why I do video recordings of people. There is so much additional information you get, listening to someone talk; the modulation of the voice, the pauses, the way they make a face. We are built to understand and read this, and pull information from it not easily translated into words and text. It is one of the hardest things to preserve and a factor often cleanly forgotten when looking over the stuff I collect.

As time goes on, the people disappear. We’re left with the shell, the cover, the basics. But I wish there was a way to easily capture more. Lacking that, the discipline is on the historian to constantly be aware that even the collection of every file, every piece and scrap of a historical situation, is still less than half the story.

It is just a muffin.

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The previous entry talked about how well things have gone with software.bbsdocumentary.com, but there are a few exceptions. Obviously, they have not had a major detriment on the site’s function, but they’re worth noting because they’re part of what contributes to my contentions about people, and conflicts within.

The “Make it Pay” episode of the BBS Documentary is missing one little chapter that I couldn’t find a way to portray without doing backflips in the narrative. In the 1992-1998 period, people started buying the rights and intellectual property of commercial bulletin board software, often speculatively and almost always to personal and financial detriment. The real peak of this activity was around 1996, by my observations. People usually bought the rights for somewhere in the range of $10k, and then waited around for the payoff.

When I was filming the documentary, some of them thought this was the payoff.

So there was a situation where there was money, serious (to individual investor) money being passed around, with BBS software. And where there’s money, there’s transactions and agreements/contracts, and where there’s agreements/contracts, there’s the potential for endless fire of death. And a few people burned in the fire of death, and some of them contacted me hoping that my documentary would highlight their product, which of course wasn’t their product, just one they bought.

But this isn’t about that set of folks.

No, at some point I had an entry in software.bbsdocumentary.com that described a software package. This package had been around in various incarnations and some incarnations were not even the same package but the name was generic enough that it still got around a bunch. I had the usual smattering of information, along with some old copies of the thing that had been distributed around.

At some point, someone wrote in with a paragraph of information. I recall it being generic and declarative from one of the people who’d bought rights, along the line of stating it was a good program and those were good times. I dropped it in.

Some months later, actually, many months later, a second person wrote in, furious about the first person.

Turned out they’d had a little business together. This business included buying this program. As far as I could tell, the business then changed core competency from purchasing rights to the program to making no money with the program. Eventually, the business ended.

But, apparently, one guy sued the other. The second guy had sued the first, that is. He demanded I put in a second paragraph, and by a second paragraph, I mean a collection of ranty self-obsessed paragraphs. Naturally I obliged. More is more, after all. I also notified the first guy about the new paragraphs.

First guy wrote me and said he was sorry he ever brought the thing up. Second guy went ballistic I’d mailed the first guy. Demanded to know why I’d not notified him upon the posting of the first guy’s paragraph way back when. We’ll leave the logic of that argument hanging.

Actually, we’ll leave most of that argument hanging, because things went downhill quickly. It turned out the lawsuit was still underway, with a years-in-the-making fight still going on over perceived lost revenue, running of the company, what efforts were where, and whether the first guy had somehow flushed the second guy out of some percentage of zero, which I believe is zero.

I’ve encountered this template before. I call it the fuckwit-dupe matrix. In this matrix, a fuckwit and a dupe get together on a project. The fuckwit is often the energy/promotion and the dupe is either the money or the effort. Together, they launch on an outing but stuff is kept kind of handshake-based because it’s usually not a big deal. The fuckwit talks all pie in the sky as if you are currently eating said pie and dupe is happy to have an environment to achieve his dreams.

This shaky foundation will last until things go south, or even more bizarrely, if success rains down. Then the already-fatally-flawed relationship becomes even more an issue, and by an issue, I mean a hands-in-face-get-off-me raging battle over scraps or piles. And it can never end because the two sides both want it to end, but in their favor: fuckwit with a vault of cash and dupe with being totally washed clean of the thing with no attachments.

Here’s some free advice, loving audience: Someone who is unnecessarily “up” about the project and prospects of your shared endeavor is someone who will be unnecessaily “down” and “completely ass-nut insane” if the shared endeavor encounters failure or lack of traction. Choose wisely and sign contracts. Even when you’re buddies. Especially when you’re buddies.

So the little battle waged in my mailbox, watching the two interacting, and finally, fuckwit went far enough to imply that I, by putting up these paragraphs, had made myself legally liable within the context of the lawsuit/settlement’s success.

Well, that did it. I removed the entry completely, blanking it out and hiding off the text. (I never delete anything completely, just make it non-browsable). I said “Yeah, so I blanked out all your insane shit.”

First guy again mailed me, going “Thank you.”
Second guy mailed me and said “Great, and when this lawsuit is settled you can put up the real story.”

I explained, patiently, that no, I was not going to put up the real story, that the page was going to be blank until both parties were dead, and then I’d put everything back. That’s my current plan. Until then, all individuals involved can swallow Draino.

So sometimes, an entry is blank for a reason, and I am reminded that, in the fields of happiness I traipse through in my daily life, there’s the occasional landmine of dumbassery to send me skyward.

DEAR GUY THIS IS ABOUT: I am not interested in any further mail from you and I will turn any further mails into a filesystem delete function test case. Eat a rock.

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One of my most successful side projects has been software.bbsdocumentary.com.

When doing research for the BBS Documentary, I wanted some idea of what I was dealing with. I had, buried in different places, the software and mentions of various packages that had lived and died, but I wanted something comprehensive, something that I could tell, at a glance, what types of software had come out for what platforms.

The resultant site is a combination of bourne shell scripts and endless acquisition and donation. I have gathered hundreds of packages and people have sent me hundreds more. This was hugely valuable during the documentary because it gave me ideas of people to contact and also provided a reference collection when people would refer to something I’d never heard of.

The site sits at over 800 packages at the moment, ranging from full-blown commercial productions to one-off shareware blurps that made a single appearance and then disappeared forever. Writing BBS Software was a natrual outgrowth for someone who used BBSes; why not try it yourself, assuming you could get the communication routines right?

I wrote my own, but it’s not on there. My rule, so things wouldn’t get crazy, was to only include packages that were distributed – custom one-off collections that had no software you could ever reach weren’t to be included. If someone had the package of the software a custom BBS used, I’ll take it, but this is almost never the case and it’s usually impossible to track that stuff down at this late stage.

In an ideal world, you have entries like the one for PBBS for the Model 100. The authors, a short paragraph, and the software. The actual program for the software is particularly enlightening in this case, as the Model 100 had almost no space and storage; note how there’s no spaces between the commands, to get back those precious characters! The system could store SIXTEEN MESSAGES. SIXTEEN. I am reminded of the pocket fox, an animal that lived for fifteen minutes in the 16th century.

More occasionally, the entries are patchy, like the one for VBBS. And some are heavy on the description, with little software to show for it, like Stonehenge. Others have almost nothing at all.

A small band of determined folks are out there, acquiring rare copies, processing them, and sending them to me. That includes Bo Zimmerman, Mark Firestone and Lance Lyon. I’m very grateful for those contributions.

The larger issue, of course, is that there is only one guy who can make changes to the site; me. Because of this situation, updates are slow, coming in refined bursts over the years. With this site almost 6 years old, it has a lot of things in it but could have a ton more. It is a classic example of what I’d hoped I’d be able to get from Wikipedia; a place where I’d be able to mirror and refine work from a whole host of contributing folks, and then put them into my site. But it’s hardly worked out that way, with Wikipedia deleting articles on specific programs left and right, due to being non-notable or otherwise someone having a bad day at just the right time for a program’s information to be lost forever. It got me on the golden road to not editing Wikipedia.

That said, I certainly collaborate with regards to this site: people send me information, or programs, or link me to other locations, and the site gets those changes added. I also, when time is long and I’m enjoying some nice music, go through the directories and do better jobs of describing items, adding pieces, pulling documentation out of archives to put up separately. (I find people often just want to read the docs and get the idea and move on.) It’s just that even so, how I put the stuff down is how it looks when I come back months later. A shame, but I do my best.

The syndrome between all my sites is “piled together syndrome”, where even a cursory inspection by a driven individual will show that the software.bbsdocumentary.com site has no collection of files for whosis, while cd.textfiles.com will have a bunch of versions of whosis in various directories. They’re piled together on the same general set of sites but they’re not acknowledged as being so. In one way this works out great because people get to be the hero and point them out to me and feel good about it. But on the other hand, it’s a shame that I can’t just make stuff “just find it”. Doesn’t work that way; likely never will for this set of data.

I don’t know how much others get out of this site, how much this site is found and used. I can see hits but they could be false ones. Someone who used a BBS or heard a version had some feature or otherwise wanted to know what a given technology person was doing before he got all the accolades for current work… well, if that’s what they’re trying to find, it’s there. That’s the success I speak of.

It’s at one gigabyte of BBS programs. Anyone who says the BBS days lacked variety compared to today are on crack. Those were some good times. And when I have time myself, I improve my collection of those moments.

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So, browsing around on Google’s new “Products” section, I found this little guy:

http://store.gameasylum.us/bbsdocumentary.html (Webcitation)

The original link is here but I don’t expect it to stick around.

What’s going on is a nice store is selling copies of the BBS Documentary. And by “copies”, I mean “copies” like you get with a couple of DVD-ROM burners and a half an hour. I can’t imagine this person is buying copies from me and then selling them at a markup. I CAN imagine he’s selling them at a markup, whatever they are; his webpage claims the “list price” is $70, which is news to me, and that you’re getting it at a bargain for $49. Meanwhile, my site sells them at $40 and you can get an autograph besides.

The description on the page is a direct copy and paste from the Wikipedia entry about my BBS Documentary, including the “[1]” reference tag which doesn’t work on his page. Of course.

Can I “do” something about this? Well, basically what I’m doing now, which is making fun of this corncob for duping unsuspecting folks that they might get a professionally printed package when it’s obvious they’re going to get three DVD-R dual-layer disks and a pat on the ass. The Creative Commons license I put them under makes what he’s doing not only “legal” but encouraged. The whole point of Creative Commons is that I don’t get a say in this sort of stuff, and I can’t spontaneously change my mind about how I released it before, just because something “new” comes to me later, like a sense of regret or capitalism.

I am reminded of my time at Psygnosis when we would get a strange tech support call for a game not officially out yet. What we’d have on the phone would be someone who bought, as in went into a store and bought, a tarted-up copy of a demo program we’d put out on a magazine or online service or whatever. You’d have the 3-level demo out there to get attention, and people would take that demo, put it into an amazingly nice-looking sleeve, and sell it for $10. Now, naturally it would say “This is a demo” on it, but it would be buried in the graphics and wonder and kissy-kissy on the back of the sleeve, so some people would think they were getting a bargain. And then it would stop working, and we’d get a call.

Of course, I could be wrong, and am besmirching one of the finest videogame establishments in Wyoming, by implying they’re duping DVD-ROMs when in fact they’re merely selling it at a 25% markup. If so, I’m sorry, assholes.

Merry Christmas.

Update: This entry was titled Stealy McStealerson and the Stealing Stealfaces, but my little joke fell on clever ears, who pointed out that even jokingly using the term “steal” with Creative Commons implies I don’t understand it, which I assure you I do. I have since made it more accurate (but less funny). Thanks to everyone concerned about my mental state.

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I was browsing some of my spam recently. Good stuff, that.

Yes, I archive my spam, just like I archive everything else. There’s stuff to be learned from it, if nothing else that spam works; nobody would do this as much as they do without it working. The introduction of Bayesian anti-spam scanning made flat-out spamming less effective, and the resulting backlash by spammers has been quite marked and intense.

Specifically, they have to do their best to make spam messages appear as much as human-sent mail as possible; where before you could just spray the world, now there’s some (minor) amount of craft, trying to negotiate the defenses people are erecting around their mailboxes.

So, speaking of erecting, an awful lot of spam wants you to grow your penis. Or, more accurately, wishes you to purchase some items that will ostensibly grow your penis. Mazel Tov! This sure beats a visit to Dr. Whitehead.

The problem is that a lot of people don’t have a penis, or don’t want to enlarge their penis, and specifically don’t want to be queried on their current penis status via e-mail at work, sandwiched between their expense reports and meeting scheduling. So they have filters in place to prevent this penis mail from showing up.

The result, then, has been an amazing amount of effort to get around this with what can only be hand-crafted subject lines, all intended to both negotiate past the automatic filters and make the reader want to open it.

Browsing my most recent pack, I found the following hopelessly elaborate subject lines informing me that I need enlargement, should immediately pursue enlargement, and that sans enlargement I am a worthless being. Check these actual subject lines out:

• Have you ever felt a kiss of a womb? With your new big rod you’ll feel it!
• Your obtained manliness will be surely noticed by every girl
• Your baby-maker needs to be bigger in order to perform its functions well
• CAUTION! she might be tight when you reach your new size, stretching may be required
• A real man will never exchange his big penis for anything.
• are you the next man in the world to get super sized in the pants?
• True masculinity is impossible without a substantial volume of male meat
• This remedy is a true godsend for your little willy
• Men with big penises go to heaven.

I am struck by the attempts to craft subject lines that beckon you to click on them or otherwise read the contents. It’s a tough thing to cold-call someone into genital enhancement therapy that doesn’t actually work. Themes of self-worth and confidence make a huge showing, while implication of power and control abounds elsewhere. The implication that penis size leads to actual ascension into heaven is a nice desperate play as well.

There’s some insights to be gained here in terms of the realms of privacy and interaction; in a world where it is costless to communicate, communication intended to enrich the communicator becomes the de-facto dominant message. Right now, spam far outstrips any other communications I get through e-mail, percentage-wise: of the 52,000 e-mails I received in a recent 28 day period, 51,200 were spam. At that point, communication with humans is a rounding error.

But at least, buried among the shit and scandal in my spam folder, some poor dope is crafting elaborate calls to regard his penis enlargement scam, trying to rise above it all.

And failing.

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Over the weekend of November 3rd-4th, I was at my old haunt, the Vintage Computer Festival, which was held once again at the Computer History Museum. This was VCF X, the tenth anniversary of the festival.

I’ve been going to this festival for about half that time, starting with a east coast VCF that was held (I went to it before I started work on the documentary, and talked up a few later interviewees) and going to as many of the west coast (original) VCFs as I could. This year was special, as I attended all three VCFs: East, Midwest, West. I figured it was worth doing, and the difference between the events is notable.

At the Midwest festival, I bumped into the Welshes, who wrote the excellent Priming the Pump, which is a history of the TRS-80 and its context in the history of microcomputers. I called Sellam Ismail, and left a message saying they should speak at the West VCF, the big one. As it turned out, they did! I’ll give a detailed review later, but here’s the short form: it’s worth buying.

A personal highlight for me was the presentation on Phone Phreaking by Phil Lapsley. I’ve been helping Phil a tiny tad with his years-in-the-making project, a book about the history of Phreaking, and I can personally attest that Phil is the real deal, a guy who has been devoting countless hours of his time to getting the story “right”. There’s nothing better for a person who thinks they know a lot about a subject to sit in a talk about said subject and learn a raft of new stuff. In Phil’s talk, I did. I’ll be sure to cry to the world when his book is generally released, likely in 2008.

Somewhere in the middle of seeing old friends, hanging out with legends, browsing the exhibits and attending the talks, I gave a short presentation about GET LAMP that ended up being multiple hours. Sellam was kind enough to ask me to show some stuff from GET LAMP, but the inherent problem is that there isn’t a lot of stuff from GET LAMP at the moment; it’s merely hundreds of classified clips. So I threw some amusing ones together with no intercutting and totalling seven minutes in length, and put everyone’s names below them as they spoke. Simple enough.

I showed the MC Frontalot video (twice, as a miscommunication put 90% of my audience in the wrong room) and then the footage I threw together. Then I talked a lot, an awful lot. And I answered questions and talked even more.

Devoid of too much structure and no real limits on the room (I was the last person to speak in it), I rambled on and on for hours, covering my philosophy in shooting, what I was going for, things I’d discovered, plans I had. I talked way too much about my thoughts on life in general, places I’d been, stuff I’d accomplished. People stayed, and very few ran for the door, which I appreciate, but I have no idea if it was actually an enjoyable experience.

I am pleased the interviews look very good; some kind soul in the audience asked how I’d gotten all the locations to look similar and sound similar and that’s 100% pure luck and practice. I have now officially filmed over 300 interviews in my documentary “career”, so there’s stuff I just “do” now. That was my favorite question, by far.

I should say that I certainly enjoyed myself giving it; I just can’t attest to people enjoying getting it. I think I need more structure in the talks.

I don’t get tired of these events; always a lot of fun, always eye-opening. I’m glad to be a part of them, where I can.

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