ASCII by Jason Scott

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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I’ve been somewhat fascinated with the term “420” recently. Not so much what the term signifies (hey, let’s smoke pot) but to watch it really break into mainstream usage and spread in crazy places.

I play online on the XBOX 360 and so many handles are variations of the term. “420 Bunny” was my favorite, but you get stuff along the line of “420killa”, “Go420”, “FourTwoOhGal” and so on. 420 seems to have penetrated even the most out-of-way locations; I see it in user icons, in newspapers, in messages, signatures, classifieds and, as mentioned, usernames.

High Times apparently has tracked this term back to 1971, with a group called The Waldos who used the term as a code around parents for smoking dope. That would make the nomenclature something like 35 years old, which is pretty far off the mark of when I would have nailed it. I’d be pressed to think this was anything that happened before 1999. It goes to show one of my little rules: stuff happened earlier than you think.

The ubiquity of the term, which ostensibly indicates a crime in most countries, is phenomenal. There’s something to be said of the layer of protection one thinks online existence affords in terms of self-declaration. And speaking of the self online:

The fact is, the world has changed in terms of self-identification; the easiest way for computers and databases to classify people and objects is via boolean flags. I am this, I am not this. And the flags themselves are most easy to code when they’re short and direct, even if they overlap to a massive spectrum of activity. I am Straight-Edge. I am 420. I am Geek. I am Gamer. You call yourself a thing or not a thing and that makes it easier for the machine to tag you. In return for this ham-fisted but ubiquitous world outlook, you are easier to search for, easier to find others who fall under this heading, easier for you to hit a button and find more stuff.

This is all fine and good until you start to pair or group up people under these tags, and then the myriad flaws in the system are obvious. There’s intense gamer geek and there’s slow-moving chess-by-email geek. There’s don’t drink at parties Straight Edge and there’s seeking-converts-to-jesus Straight Edge. There’s good-time 420 guy and there’s barely functional 420 spiraling loser. Shared flags are not a bond. They might help, or they might hurt. But it sure is easy to classify.

A fundamental aspect of this is objective observation of the self, which is a rather difficult process. When 90% of the people think they’re above average, you run into issues related to honesty and usefulness of a graph. When a group decides to ban a member, the resultant shudder can tear it apart.

420 is now morphed into a brand, a lifestyle, a commercial front, but people do that with anything. That there’s now “rallies” on April 20th (4/20) and 420 shows up on clothing is a separate situation, the same reason that any assembling of more than 300 people causes a balloon vendor. Focusing instead on the 420 as flag-within-itself, it’s rife and ready for misuse.

“420 friendly” is a term that shows up in places, and to the weary eye of the browser it can be interpreted several ways: “I smoke pot”, “I don’t mind if you light up in my house”, “I’m going to keep going to the bathroom and light a joint at your party”, or “I am going to consistently, whiningly beg for some of your pot”.

Robert Hayden, faced with this inevitable issue of booleans being poor nomenclatures, created The Geek Code, which enabled a person to delcare their entire life and outlook in a large series of codes, each with a myriad of variations:

Books

b++++
I read a book a day. I have library cards in three states.
I have discount cards from every major bookstore.
I've ordered books from another country to get my Favorite Author Fix.
b+++
I consume a few books a week as part of a staple diet.
b++
I find the time to get through at least one new book a month.
b+
I enjoy reading, but don't get the time very often.
b
I read the newspaper and the occasional book.
b-
I read when there is no other way to get the information.
b--
I did not actually READ the geek code, I just had someone tell me.

This system is not perfect, but note how the self-identification is along concrete standards, with a few “general” variations as well. You don’t have to say “I’m pretty smart”, you say how many degrees you have or what you’ve accomplished. This system is not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than “420” on its own.

Remind me to hammer the “fish symbol” and the “ribbon” magnet next.

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I hate slow time.

Slow time happens when I am in the middle of multiple difficult things that require more than a single sitting to accomplish, and I find myself going between these projects in a round-robin fashion, stuffing days of effort into a multi-hour box. It does not work, it never works and I end up taking way too long.

The frustrating thing is that I am often in a position with one project to want to work on another. That is, while I’m driving around doing interview I have weblog postings I am thinking about. When I’m sorting papers I have people I want to be correponding with. When I’m fixing a long-overdue misconfiguration I want to be editing video. And so it goes.

By now wily people will notice I am backdating entries again. I went back and forth on this and I am committed to doing five-a-day entries for the rest of 2007 and then I will go to a as-it-happens format as things really heat up elsewhere in my life. So then, when I disappear for weeks, I’ll just come back with why I disappeared and that’ll be that.

Until then, here’s some thoughts and writings that have been building up for a while….

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Here’s how a minor point becomes a really odd obsession and a hard-to-explain result.

My fifth interview on the BBS Documentary was Brian J. Bernstein and David Fleischer, who had run a New Jersey BBS back in the 1980s. This intersected with a bunch of my interests, as I’d been in NY and called all sorts of NJ BBSes whenever I had a chance. I loved the Apple II and they ran a BBS on it, and they also interacted (making fun of) diversi-dials, which I also wanted mention of. So I went down to New York City to interview them.

While setting up (and it took me a while because I was so new to this) I marveled at Brian’s excellent apartment. It had all the earmarks of excellent urban living: large living space, huge countertop island in the kitchen area, and halogen lights hanging from the finished-yet-unfinished ceiling. I just thought it looked great and was happy to capture this on video. Here’s some shots of that apartment:

When I saw the DJ setup in the corner, I said, out loud “Man, the only thing missing here is a guitar on a stand.”

Brian said “Oh, I have one of those.”

I said “Let’s bring that in!”

So, if you look at the back of the final shot, you can see a guitar on a stand:

A little joke, a little bit of me enjoying myself.

Well, within a short time, I started noticing a LOT of people had guitars on stands. And each time I saw one, I requested it be in the shot. And people complied.

Beyond the interviews that had them, the number of shots of each person in the final episodes meant that once you noticed one, you just keep on noticing them. It is entirely a construct, something I did in the middle of production on a whim and which stands there, finally, probably confusing someone down the line. But it doesn’t affect what people had to say and nobody referenced it.

The movie’s full of those little stories. I’ll tell more as I recall them.

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Sometime ago, I mentioned a steakhouse (called Alexander’s) that I ate a very expensive steak at. (The cost was $250, in case anyone goes back and reads it and wonders what the number was).

At this steakhouse, while we were waiting for our table, the kindly person whose job was to keep waiting customers happy asked if we wanted something to drink. Well, I don’t drink. I don’t have alcohol and never have. So I asked what might be available in a non-alcoholic fashion.

People usually offer juice, or chocolate. This guy asked me if I wanted some Pinot Noir grape juice.

Pinot Noir… grape juice?

Well, naturally I’d want to try that!

It turned out to be a beautiful exquisite taste, so unlike grape juice you might find in a store, with all those excellent things that people who drink wine probably mean when they talk about finish and full-bodied and all that stuff. It was just great.

I raved about it for days afterwards, then I’d mention it occasionally and then not again.

I went back to that restaurant recently, and had another glass. Actually, I’m lying. We ordered two bottles of it, and that’s when we found out the name of the place: Navarro Vineyards. They even ship, which is why I’m ordering a bunch of bottles for myself.

I get all that goofyness of wine-ordering, with the cork and the chilling and the special pouring, except there’s no actual alcohol involved. Works for me.

I could now launch into a whole considering of my non-drinking ways, but it will seem pedantic to someone who doesn’t drink and will seem weird to someone who does. Needless to say, if you don’t drink, your wine selection is severely limited and so this grape juice will do nicely.

P.S. Do not offer me a chance to learn how wonderful it is to drink alcohol.

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Everyone who wrote to me when I announced my finger nearly being severed will be happy to know that the finger has 100% healed and you couldn’t tell in a million years that the finger ever got stuck in a fan. The nail’s entirely back and the whole thing has grown back like nothing ever happened. Score one for luck.

Actually score a billion for luck, because I’ve had more ludicrous close shaves, more cases of waking up driving, more cases of stepping away from a thing that’s then imploded or gone killdozer than I really deserve, statistically. I acknowledge this and let you know that if I end up perishing in some absolutely ludicrous fashion, it will merely be the one fatal false step in what was a towering pile of non-fatal false steps. The house wins, but I broke even most of the time.

This isn’t some suicide note or anything, just mentioning my appreciation of my good luck. It’s good to be aware that you don’t necessarily “deserve” a break, especially when it comes at the end of spectacularly risky behavior.

And I can vouch that I am much slower and methodical about the process of loading USB drives into a cabinet with a fan in it.

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I love Grr Guy. Grr Guy is awesome.

Grr Guy’s messages are (usually) short, snappy and to the point. If you could translate them from whatever language Grr Guy writes in to useable english, it’ll look like this:

TO: Jason Scott
FROM: Grr Guy

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Now, granted, Grr Guy can sometimes take many paragraphs to say this, or just a few lines, but this is the gist of it.

Grr guy has to be considered separate from Wronged Guy or Guy I Called a AssMunch, people who I am specifically targeting or bothering or otherwise in conflict with. No, Grr Guy actually has very little direct interaction with the subject at hand. It’s not about being mistreated by me; it’s about being incensed and not approving. Disapproval is Grr Guy’s fuel for his anger engine, which he is revving very menacingly at me.

BBS days had less Grr Guys simply because the barrier to entry was higher; you were calling a BBS and leaving messages and sending one directly to the person meant that you had to be, with few exceptions, a member of that BBS, had been doing stuff on it, was a part of it. Like I said, Grr Guy’s about disapproving something he has no direct pain from. That was pretty rare, back then.

But now, you can go to a website, read a paragraph, and bang out some half-assed Grrrr within seconds. You don’t have to know anything about the paragraph-writer, the site, or even the subject being discussed. Just drop a bomb and move onto the next waiting target. It’s very easy, very simple, and the resultant waves of response don’t really wash over you because Grr Guy is Gone.

When I get one of my little prominence bursts, Grr Guys come out from all sorts of places, and the next thing I know everything’s up for grabs. The result, often, is a decision to ignore all incoming Grrs until they’re gone.

This is sort of a mistake. Sort of.

Even though the signal to noise ratio is like running your ipod through a degaussing magnet, there are very occasional bursts of useful information in the pool of Grr. One of the things I love doing is browsing a slashdot story at “show me every last bit”, because sometimes down in the sewer of anonymous assery is a real insight that’s simply been pounded down into obscurity by overzealous on-topic cops.

Unfortunately, the method of deployment for a Grr and for a totally-nails-it, cut-out-the-bullshit assessment is the same. People make brilliant insights in short, snappy writings, often doing so with a dash of insult and a hint of dismissal. This is the same container as a Grr but the payload is precious. Devoid of context, missing the vital personality-cult veneer friends and fans make, someone is potentially going to give you some really good advice, although delivered with all the panache and love of a claw hammer. But that advice, it’s vital! Or it’s a Grr.

For all his annoyances, for all his propensity to be a time waster, I really do like Grr guy. I can hear him late at night, disapproving, dismissing, running away.

Grrrrrrrr.

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FiOS was installed into my home today.

This augments my T-1 line, which is where a lot of my other servers not handled by outside hosting goes. When you go to cow.net, or this weblog, you’re yanking from the T-1. FiOS will up my current download speed from 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps, and upload speed from 1.5Mbps to 5Mps.

I am not 100% fantastically happy to be utilizing Verizon’s service, but they’re the dominant monopoly and I went for the one year signup. If they blow, they go. And believe me I’ll know.

I see gabillions of “I got FiOS Installed” weblog postings out there, including this excellent one from Dan Bricklin, so I won’t fill your screen or time with yet another one, even if I thought I could make it “funny”. My installer is on the ball, friendly, young and knows his crap. Hooray for that; it harkens me back to the early days of my phone life and meeting the Bell engineers who were on top of stuff.

So, if you find anything slow this evening, blame me as I begin downloading the Internet.

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When I was a student at Emerson College, I worked at and studied near the campus FM radio station (WERS, 88.9). The radio station took up all of a floor in one of the multiple interconnected buildings. The combination of doing some stuff there and being in the building meant I went by their entrance, often.

At the end of each semester or so, WERS would throw out dozens of records. Most were freebies sent by record companies to get played at college radio stations. A few were sets dropped off by hopeful artists trying to get their name out. They were usually scribbled on, or marked up. They were also often notched, because then the record company could report them as “damaged/discarded”, and then not pay the artists for the distributed music.

ANYWAY.

I, being who I am, would scarf up way too many of these freebie discards, and one of the discards was a strange album called “Movieland”. The cover was almost pure white except for the name of the band (in Arial Bold or thereabouts) and three people, two guys and a girl, one guy in bright colors and the other in a prim suit. The back of the album was similarly strange, with a list of credits (as one would find in the inner sleeve of a CD) and another odd photo of the three people. It went on the stack with the rest.

So when I finally got it back to the dorm and played it, I was quite struck by it. It turned out to be a combination of pop-synth music, and sample collage! This, for someone who loved Art of Noise, was a big deal; another cool band with off-kilter sample stuff!

And off-kilter it was. While some of the music was not out of place on top-40 radio, other pieces were almost horrific, with cries for help and sobbing punctuated by upbeat crescendos of drumbeats and chords. It was fun, weird stuff and it stuck with me. I couldn’t even tell you one other album I got from the discard pile.

So, years later, it’s 1995 and I own cow.net, my beloved bovine-themed ISP, and on the site I can put anything I want.

So I put up a Movieland Fan Page.

Very basic stuff. I put up a scan of the album, a transcription of the credits, and whatever meager information I could dig up on the members. They didn’t have long pedigrees that I could find online at the time, and the names weren’t all that easy to find. Interestingly enough, some fonts are now huge because I made the site in a text editor on a Sun 3/280 in 1995, utilizing the Netscape browser circa 1995. Not quite as compatible, these days.

So then I left it. I had my little fan page up, I was happy. Occasionally, like, every few years, I’d get some drib of information and off it would go into the page, or I’d find a link somewhere, and add it. It was way in the background. I’m sure in the last 12 years it’s been up, I’ve spent a total of 5 hours on it.

So what’s interesting to me is how it functioned as a beacon, a catch-all.

As search engines got more and more of a grip on things, my page got bundled up into them. As Altavista flattened the world wide web, turning any insanely-addressed page into a findable piece of information, so too did this put me in front of the face of people who were actually looking for Movieland.

Bear in mind that in 12 years, only one person has ever contacted me about the page, purely as a fan. So there’s your one-to-one.

But in fact, I was contacted by one of the recording engineers, a person who knew one of the band members, and ultimately by a student of one of the members… who lived in Massachusetts! This was Richard Lewis, who was one of the songwriters and vocalists of Movieland.

So, I contacted him. And he wrote back!

It turned out that one of his students (he teaches at Salem State College) had told him about it some time ago, but his letter to me didn’t get to me for whatever reason. So he’d known about it too.

He answered some questions for me about the band and the outcome of it (short form, he did some work with the eventual co-member, who got them hooked into the “industry”, they did the album and later a few gigs and then RCA dropped them). And he also mentioned he had a new band, called Machine 475. (Warning: Plays Music)

Machine475, really, is basically Movieland 3.0. It utilizes better equipment, but his vocals are in there, along with a whole range of other cool influences and co-writers making it even more engaging and dynamic. And now they’re doing live gigs!

I went to one last night, limping with gout and woozy from the medicine I’ve been taking. I got some good shots, although I used entirely the wrong lens.

The full album is here.

The songs were great, live. It’s heavily pre-programmed but with a collection of ingredients mixed onstage between the members. Richard Lewis’ wife played the harp for three songs, and he played the Theremin besides a range of samples and keyboarding, as well as vocals.

In between sets, I introduced myself and he knew immediately who I was. And was delighted I’d shown.

I mention all this because of the serendipity of things, finding this album completely randomly, and then a few years later I meet one of the members. My web page, going from a side effort, gains notoriety and linkage into the world, introducing hundreds to this band (I’ve seen the hits go up and down over the years). It’s all very fun, very exciting.

And has a great beat.

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