ASCII by Jason Scott

Another day, another gout attack. These things are fantastic.

Gout manifests itself in many ways, in hugely variant amounts of pain or discomfort. For me, I have a range of situations I go through with my gout that makes it especially interesting. Specifically, my left elbow swells up, which lets me know the fun’s coming. Then, my left knee starts to swell. Initially, it’s not a big deal, and I limp a little, but then it swells to the point that you can no longer see any kneecap, and then I basically can’t move.

So, I end up propped in front of a computer or on a couch, kind of lumped there, with enough pain that I can’t quite concentrate on things. That’s been the last couple of days.

This, as I mentioned previously, motivates me to want to really get stuff done when I return to normal. And return I will. Just not today.

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Fred Fish died in April of this year, many months ago. Research into my previous weblog entry on raytracing caused me to discover this.

When someone like Fred Fish dies, there isn’t that sort of reverberating echo throughout the world that a standard-issue celebrity might achieve. This is the price paid for doing something good but not then following it up with a series of infamous-enough actions or projects that your name lives in infamy and your death even more so.

No, Fred Fish merely did some really great stuff for the Amiga and then went on to do some great (but not leader-oriented) stuff in computer programming and then he died, at age 54.

Fred was an archiver and organizer, like myself. In his case, it was Amiga shareware. As shareware became available, Fred would assemble them onto floppies, archived and described, and then make them available. They were called the “Fred Fish Disks”, or sometimes the “Fish Disks”. Just looking for his name will get you lists like this one. Basically, if you were looking for stuff for your Amiga, it passed through Fred’s hands. Fred worked for years on this, creating over a thousand of these floppies from the usual BBS morass of files, making it that much easier to find stuff.

There’s an impulse I have these days to go and interview someone, and their death and my not meeting them means that interview would not happen, but I don’t think that would have been overly relevant here. Fred was a collector, and he shared his collecting with others, and the world was better for it. I know I benefited from his years of effort and I know many, many others did too.

Thanks, Fred.

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A long time ago, I was a render junkie. I got better.

Like a lot of people, my real introduction to Raytracing as a concept came in the form of the Amiga Juggler, a had-to-be-impossible animation created by Eric Graham that was doing some sort of amazing trickery with graphics and reflections that were well beyond anything I’d seen before. Well, more accurately, I had seen stuff like this before, but it was off in the realm of however-they-do-movies, stuff like the Tron films and Juggler Adam Powers. This was stuff that people could be using most anything to accomplish, but the Juggler that I saw was being done on my Amiga, and I simply could not fathom that.

As an example of the disposability of graphics, you might look at this animation with a weary eye and conclude it is simplistic, easy-to-pull off and no great shakes. But at the time, I do assure you, it was a miracle. Specifically, the reflections of the glass balls are a miracle, while the rest of it is merely astounding beyond normal measure. Raytracing, you see, was one of those innovations that far outstripped my own abilities and understanding, yet its output was obvious and fascinating. You could tell me that you’d mathematically constructed a model for simulating rays of light as they would appear to bounce around a scene and therefore could create highly realistic and accurate images, but I wouldn’t really understand how you would do that. I suspect I still don’t. Others, naturally, have an innate ability to understand all this; one of my heroes Drew Olbrich not only wrote ray-tracers for fun and learning but even did one with a calculator and markers, which is up there with the kind of magic that sends you immediately to hell.

If my salad bar of superlatives seems over the top, this is really how raytracers and the concept of them excite me.

Somewhere after the explosion of the Amiga Juggler, came DKBtrace, a command-line raytracer for the Amiga written by David K. Buck and which dropped, into my waiting hands, the ability to actually do raytracing. Bear in mind, of course, that raytracing under these circumstances might seem a bit strange. Without a graphics interface, all scenes and lights and everything else were pure textfiles. Here’s how you’d make a red sphere:

OBJECT
SPHERE <0 0 3> 1 END_SPHERE
TEXTURE
COLOUR Red
END_TEXTURE
END_OBJECT

I assure you, a person who is motivated enough can put up with and learn anything. Being given the tools with which to accomplish something wanted beyond all measure, no matter how strange the tools, is a minor hurdle. I learned the arcane DKBtrace language and how to do light sources (you created a sphere and colored it what was needed and then declared it a light source) and all the rest of it, and I could raytrace before I turned 20.

That said, bear in mind that rendering a 320×200 image on an Amiga 1000 was an overnight, 8 hours+ commitment. The system was doing a lot of calculation to generate these images, and it taxed the system completely. And sometimes it would crash. Still, of course, I immediately shot for the moon and wanted to do a movie on it.

My movie, which I haven’t given much thought to in the last 15 years, involved having shopping carts recreating a dance scene from West Side Story. I don’t even know how I expected to accomplish this, but I figured, probably reasonably so, that by the time I got one aspect of the approach down (making the shapes, doing the test renders), technology would slowly increase to the point that I would either be able to get what I wanted or know somebody who did.

I did some basic work with florescent lights (huge rectangles, add width, color white, add second rectangle, color gray) and with making shelves of products, and so on. Bear in mind, we’re talking weeks, with the computer left to “render” out my test models and other items while I walked around the streets of Boston in the 1990-1991 period. A very strange time.

However, more critically, as I got into the Internet (pre-web version) and was finding myself on UNIX boxes, I made the delightful discovery that DKBtrace had been ported to UNIX! Not only that, I loaded up some of my data files, and they worked, and not only did they work, but they worked fast. A UNIX box could render these images in less than an hour, and do it in the background (as this was my inspiration to learn about the “&” backgrounding command in UNIX), and have it waiting for me the next time I logged in.

So there is this period of time in my life, going from around 1990 to 1993, when I am a complete and utter rendering junkie. What I mean by that is that I would beg, borrow and steal my way onto any machine I could find, anything with a unix account and an ability to compile, and I would upload DKBtrace (and its later incarnation, POVray), compile it, and then start sucking up the CPU cycles. And again, this is not minor computation I was doing, especially as I jammed things up to 640×480 images. We’re talking one of the most active processes on a machine, easily noticeable, a hostage situation for the processor, making my images.

I’d start out rendering one of the default images, just to get a handle on how powerful the processor was. One of my favorites was this pac-man image done by Ville Saari, because you got this wonderful reflection-filled creation and based on how many minutes it took to render, you knew exactly how good a machine you’d snagged.

I have this great memory of visiting Clarkson University related to my online game for a party, and hanging with a guy, and then finding out he had access to a bunch of UNIX machines. “Oh, REALLY,” I said, like an drunk finding out your dad had a liquor cabinet downstairs. Next thing I knew, I was on a bunch of boxes, just rendering like a maniac, drinking in the fast CPUs, pulling in the reflections, making those machines my little slaves.

Like I said, I got better.

I’m not quite sure why I stopped, but I did. I still visit the POVray Hall of Fame, and love going to Pixar movies and still go out of my way to see the computer-generated films even if a lot of them suck. The love is there. But I guess it’s similar to why I don’t work on videogames anymore; too many people with too much more time than me doing way too much cooler stuff. “Core Competency”, that easily-thrown-out term by a million middle managers, applies here. It’s not where I’m really good at things and so many people are kicking ass. So I don’t.

In the middle of my work at Focus Studios, the game startup I spent my 26th year at, there was a need to create a mock-up computer animation of a game being worked on. Two months went into that, utilizing 3D Studio max and textures in Photoshop and so on. I thought it was very good, what came out the other end, but I don’t have much record of it. What I was struck by, at the time, was how much easier things were. Graphical Interface, render times, choice of textures, reflectivity… it was all slick and easy compared to my earlier days, strung out on CPU cycles and traced rays. I think that was the last time I really did much in the way of 3D graphics work that was anything like my misspent early 20s. I do miss that, the waiting for the picture to render, the anticipation that I got things right, and the dim glow of reflected metal in what I ultimately produced.

I miss it very much. Like any recovered junkie.

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I didn’t record a frame of film. It was a roaring success.

I mention this because the whole reason I work the way I do on my films is to specifically avoid the kind of disposable relationships and interaction with others that plague a lot of professional productions. I maintain the goal of having nobody regret having been interviewed or dealing with me, during my documentaries. Of course, this is never 100% the case but the resultant percentage where people are unhappy are usually because of one of two reasons:

• They thought I was making a different documentary than I was.
• They agreed to be interviewed without really understanding what that meant.

So one of the ways I avoid these problems is to give folks warning about my coming in with camera and questions, and talking to them, if not extensively, at least once or twice beforehand. My experience and rule of thumb, for example, is that if you interview someone within a week of them hearing of your film, it’s probably going to go pretty badly. Probably the biggest misunderstanding is thinking I can do the filming in a local restaurant… followed by not understanding the the interview is on camera. It just leads to heartache.

So I spent all of today driving 230 miles, to meet twenty people and record none of them. Of course, my camera, lights and other stuff was in my car, and I’d flown it all from Boston to be at the ready, but it was never brought out, never used.

Instead, I talked. I talked about my production, about the community I was hanging with. I was talked to about interesting events, books to read and research and about various details. I’ll be heading to the location again, a month later, a little more money spent.

But instead of focusing on the cost, it’s about doing things right. I lose some opportunities here and gain others. I do know, however, that nobody was used and the resulting footage will be real and honest.

I mention all this because people sometimes might see the result of my work and wonder both how I get people to talk like they do, and what my methods are. They might surmise I spring surprises on people or mislead them. I do not.

So lacking not a shot at all, my documentary will still benefit. Sometimes that’s how it benefits the most.

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I head to PhreakNIC Thursday morning, flying down and sticking around until Monday morning, then back home. After this, it’s off to Atlanta for a weekend, then the west coast for two weeks, and likely Kentucky, as well as Chicago. Yes, this is almost all to do with my little film.

I put off the pain until it wasn’t feasible to anymore. Now I’m taking it on. Wish me well.

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I purchased two terabytes of disk space yesterday, as one might buy a loaf of bread or a magazine off a rack. For roughly $500, I had two boxes, each containing a disk drive with 1 terabyte of raw space. This translated to roughly 960 gigabytes of disk space when I formatted them into my system.

They function as a mirror, synchronized two times a day, allowing me the freedom of committing an action on one and not having it on the other, such as whole-scale deletion or misdirection of files. So these two terabytes function as a much more robust single terabyte.

This new partition, mountable via Samba to m video editing and web browsing machines, holds static items. These are the things I download or acquire, the stock in trade of data for a lot of my disk usage outside of the editing. I see something, I grab it. I desire many of some thing, I torrent it. A foolish rube puts something for download of questionable wisdom but great popularity, and I archive a copy, marking its context and storing it away for a rainy day that may never come. Surprisingly enough, that day sometimes does.

Much of what I collect is the digitization of others’ works, works that took months or years to create. Weeks to scan and digitize. Minutes for me to download. Seconds for me to store.

This has yanked a lot of data from a lot of disparate locations I had, letting me team up collections of music, movies, websites and scans into one understandable and classifiable place. It’s a wonderful thing to have.

Within 20 hours, I had filled this new drive pair up to 70%. By late tonight it will likely be at 90%. And my online collections will be right there, waiting for me, when it amuses or excites me to see it.

It’s a wonderful time.

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I’ve been very good, haven’t I? It’s been months since I mentioned Wikipedia on here in any amount. That’s on purpose. It gets old. I sound one-note. I’d rather be known for doing stuff than bitching about how others do stuff.

But I did want to say something, because sometimes I’m driving and I grip the steering wheel tighter, or I’m working on something and my face gets redder. Just a little wave of anger, a little passing torrent of pissed-off. I should get it out.

I wouldn’t care so much about criticizing Wikipedia if I didn’t see such potential in the approach. If I didn’t think that, at the core of it, there was such an amazing potential for goodness to come out, and then to see it not be that, I wouldn’t give Wikipedia a second thought. I don’t give sites like Everything or H2G2 much of my attention because they’re cute and all but I don’t actually get excited thinking about them. If they’re run well or not well, this doesn’t affect my life all that much.

But Wikipedia does. Wikipedia sends tons of links my way. People have taken material at great handfuls from my works and put it, wholescale, on articles without attribution. They are in my face constantly when I do searches. I get to watch tons of people link to the Wikipedia Article something as the sum total of their explanation to a newbie or uninformed compatriot. I can’t get away from it.

So every once in a while I browse it. I browse it for things I couldn’t possibly have my life affected about if it was entirely wrong, so that basically means I use it to browse comic book plots and…. well, basically comic book plots. You could vandalize the hell out of the comic book plot entries and big deal, I now got my Plastic Man history wrong, woop-de schnoz.

And when I browse it, I remember why I hate how it actually works. And what I hate the most is the notability debate.

I don’t mean just hate it, like you hate how you missed the train, or hate a food that tastes horrible to you. I mean loathe it, loathe it like nothing I can remember in my adult life. A long time ago, someone launched into a multi-month terror campaign against me, calling me on all my phone lines (including ones not assigned to me) to tell me he was waiting near my house with a shotgun to kill me, tapping my phone lines (from within his job in the phone company) and then calling me later and using details of the tapped conversations to threaten me further. Eventually, friends of his blackmailed me for hundreds of dollars to stop the campaign (which did stop immediately). I hate that guy, and his friends.

But I hate the notability debate more than that.

The notability debate is this:

Obviously, Wikipedia can’t have an article on every single thing that everybody creates for it, because sometimes people make redundant crap, make crap nobody else can even verify (list of things in my dorm room), or crap that doesn’t actually exist (“On the other side of Saturn is Basar, a moon in the shape of a unicorn”). Thus, there are procedures in place on Wikipedia to handle these situations. If someone puts a totally fictional or utterly unverifiable entry into Wikipedia, then there are deletion “discussions” that take place about them. The discussions range from utterly brilliant to pants-on-head retarded, depending on the phase of the moon and the popularity of the subject or even the personality of the party initiating the deletion “discussion”. At the end of this, if the fictional/unverifiable item is deemed to be just that, it is deleted out of the wikipedia database (actually, it’s simply marked unbrowsable).

If the entry is considered to be redundant or unable to stand on its own, then it is often merged or “redirected”. An example might be an entry on pumpkin seeds, which might be a short entry, which becomes a single paragraph in the “pumpkin” entry. Attempts to look up “pumpkin seeds” are redirected to the pumpkin entry. The discussion over whether an article can stand on its own or be a small part of another begins to get heated because instead of focusing on it being a mere classification discussion, it becomes a worthiness or value discussion. By the way, there’s more than enough information on pumpkin seeds to warrant a separate article.

These value discussions are cancer. They infest Wikipedia everywhere; instead of being about how to fit in the maximum amount of information while still maintaining accessibility and consistency and quality, they become about what “deserves” to be in Wikipedia. You know, the honor to be bestowed.

Among the mutations of the cancer is the aforementioned notability. In the notability discussion, Wikipedia is thought of as a high-water-mark, where only items, persons and entities that would normally acquire collated information and the need for information of a certain level should be in Wikipedia. The alternative is thought of, among a portion of users, as an untenable quagmire of unmaintainable slag. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, you see, and should hold encyclopedic standards. Never mind that it’s not an encyclopedia and has never been able to maintain that facade properly; at the end of the day you shouldn’t expect to be reading articles in Wikipedia that have no encyclopedic value. Well, unless it’s lists of porn stars who appeared in mainstream films. Or a list of fictional guidebooks. Or Brainfuck.

I can cherry-pick shit all day; obviously there are now millions of articles to choose from. Some of them are completely out of the realm of significant to the vast majority of humans; in fact, a lot of them probably share this classification. But they mean enough to people to want to write out entries and maintain them. And improve them, and fight the inevitable grey-gooing that occurs to a lot of Wikipedia articles by bot, incompetence and hostility. These items exist. They are classifiable. They are information.

But the notability cancer makes it simple enough for a do-gooder or person looking for brownnoser points to come along, delcare a subject “not notable” and shift the resultant process into one of defending or detracting the article. And make this clear: they detract not only the article but the subject matter.

Go spend time on this page. Specifically, you will need to browse over to the daily list of defendants brought before the High Court of Wikipedia. Here are the 105 discussions opened yesterday.

First, ignore the actual discussions. Click on the headers, the actual articles being discussed. Go browse them, see the weeks or months of work put into them. See ones that are a few scant lines and a bunch that are basically fully formed.

Then go back to the discussions.

Watch the arguments. Watch how “notability” becomes the core discussion the vast majority of time. Keep an eye out for how many times someone not only dismisses the notability of the subject but the subject itself. Watch the times when someone who actually cares about the subject stands up for it, and the debate becomes whether the subject itself is worthy to be in Wikipedia. Note the fear that if one of “this type” gets in, many more will follow. In rare occasions the subjects or experts in the subject show up, and then the real knives come out.

What is the fear here? Why is there concern that an article maintained for months on end (go check the history of an article and see how long it has been around) by many different people who obviously thought it worthy enough to stay will somehow infect the Wikipedia collection with its obscurity? When did the classification of information become an incredible black art that only a few could fathom? Where is the effort obviously being sprayed down the well in writing these articles redirected to classify them?

Once, the internet was considered such a powerful new technology and such an expensive experiment, that the idea of it going for any information outside of the core values of scientific and academic spheres was not just downplayed but grounds for termination of employment and connection to the greater internet. Here, for example, is a discussion showing how Xerox cut off usenet access to a newsgroup due to too much “Star Trek” traffic. This concern was valid, in 1983; the transfer of massive amounts of messages could equal many (and I do mean many) thousands of dollars in additional costs for bandwidth. Consumer-level disk storage was measured in the hundreds of dollars per megabyte. Hundreds of dollars per megabyte. This was a real and valid issue.

As time went on, these costs and concerns reduced. Subject matter diversified into not just items of pop culture and trivia but also sexuality, classifieds and fiction. The facility sustained these expansions. People worked very, very hard to ensure these expansions were maintainable. They increased political discussions, cries for help, declarations of bravery and stupidity. And engineers spent weekends at ray-guns destroying their vision to advance classification and routing mechanisms to ensure this information could be found. This happened. It is happening.

And now in this modern era, we live in the shadow of this promise, this goddamned promise that Jimmy Wales makes in endless speeches and presentations and writings to the world, where “the sum of all human knowledge” shall be accessible, even one riddled with crappy writing or stunted committee-led construction. High Watermarks, Jimbo, they’re not just for speeches, anymore.

I sometimes stumble upon them, these great leap backwards, these popularity contests, these endless procedural dodgeball team tryouts where people are encouraged to dismiss, deride, flaunt their ignorance of a subject as proof of its unworthiness for the Wikipedia, and that’s where the anger comes from. That such things happen now, in 2007, where a USB key that could hold days of music or centuries of text could be had for a paltry sum, is beyond reckoning.

I lay this travesty, this waste of energy, time and good faith, on Jimmy Wales. He sets the tone for the project, he talks the endless game, he sits for his never-ending schedule of shallow interviews. People cite him like he’s a new version of the bible. He could step in and with deft words stop entire ranges of actions should he so choose. I’ve seen him do it. That Wikipedia has a “Ignore All Rules” rule is directly from his pen and left in to give himself enormous veto power over any action. He has used this “rule” many times. He will continue to. He should use it here.

Otherwise, all I can do is thank him; thank him for making it clear how much energy I have saved myself the past three years by not contributing to the project, thank him for showing others the dangerous pitfalls of turning all knowledge into an essentially rules-based game, and thank him for not, on any given day, getting better at hiding his baser motives.

Something great will grow from Wikipedia’s mulch. The notability fad poisons this potentially fertile ground. Stop this madness, this backward-thinking unlimited popularity contest played with the efforts of real people to do real things.

It is a joke, a mad sick joke, and I have long stopped laughing at it.

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I walk a fine line here. Let’s see how well I do.

The fine line is to accolade without spoiling. I hate spoiling, especially when so much about the greatness of something depends on you not knowing much. Knowing more and more about how something comes out pulls you a few paces away from your experience. If someone says “Ah, that game, with the flaming monkey head”, then you will likely find yourself no longer playing this new game, instead cleaving the experience into pre-flaming monkey head and post-flaming monkey head. It’s what people do, and I don’t want to do it for you here.

Sometimes, too, the reason you like something is less that thing than where you are in life. I’ve found that I adore a creation, and to others who do nothing but watch things in the same genre it’s just another one. I like the horrible movie The Apple simply because I am stunned at the level of choreography, costuming and set design put into this forgettable plot and badly-stitched set of scenes, especially because I make films myself now. Just as you can blow your mind realizing that the Leaning Tower of Pisa was built over hundreds of years and contractors on the job knew it was screwed up halfway through, I find myself attracted to some things because of the story of its creation. Or because I’ve never seen anything like it.

So yes, I am speaking of Portal. This is a game that came out this week for computers and consoles. I have the downloading network known as “Steam” installed on my computer, so I paid my $20 and got Portal and started playing it, considering it a little throwaway jaunt of a short few hours.

I did not expect a transcendental experience. But I sure as hell got one.

So I can’t, of course, tell you anything about the game in any concrete sense, other than to say it starts out somewhat simplistic and funny and then somewhere down the line my head exploded. And as I was picking up pieces of my exploded head, I got my head super-double-exploded, all while laughing what was left of my head off.

But I believe if I knew ANYTHING about the game beforehand, I’d have not had half this good experience. If I’d traipsed through a bunch of youtube videos or reviews or even backstory, I bet I’d have been enjoying it but not a combination of side-swiped and floored. (And then hammered and then head-explody, as previously referenced.)

So take my advice and download it now and play it and don’t read anything more about it. Just do it.

But more than this advice, something else here reminded me of effort I am making with GET LAMP.

GET LAMP is meant to eclipse BBS DOCUMENTARY on some levels. Obviously not in terms of pure length or number of interviews, but in image/sound quality, interactivity, adherence to the subject, crazy tangential references, and so on, I want you to be amazed when you go through it. Obviously, people who watch a lot of stuff may not be “amazed” by anything I do, or really have the capacity to be “amazed” by any movie that arrives on a DVD. But for a segment of people, I want them to see this film and be blown away on a bunch of levels. I want them to go in, expecting it to be OK, and then be blown away when it’s fantastic. BBS Documentary did this to people, but I want this one to be an even larger group of people.

And sometimes, when it’s dark and I’m tired, I look at footage to be shot and footage shot and think “This won’t be fantastic as I wish it to be”. But then, a little later, I look at it all from another angle and think “yes, if I pair this with this and add this, it will be, very much”.

Things like Portal remind me that there are people who, like myself, sit and stare at something and go “How can we make this even better. How can we make this go from being amazing to being beyond amazing. What will happen if I focus on this aspect for a week. What will happen if I take this risk.”

And that’s a great reminder.

Now go get Portal.

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This entry does not expire. If you find it months or years onward, it is still valid.

I’ve had a request for some Compuserve forums and messages, and the fact is, I just don’t have that much. When I was on Compuserve around the 1983 period through a stolen account, I downloaded megabytes of text over time. But I didn’t do much with the forums and I didn’t do much past the early 1980s.

If you have copies of these forums, of material from Compuserve, please contact me. I will build a separate archive of Compuserve forums and memorabilia. It’s time to save that historical treasure, definitively.

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I’ve given some small amount of thought (really, quite small), to where GET LAMP will premiere. BBS Documentary was first shown in rough cut at the Vintage Computer Festival but I won’t have this thing in time for this year and next year will be too late. Right now, GET LAMP is 600 clips totaling roughly 5.5 hours, so it has some way to go to what would be called finished; right now, there are 30 seconds of edited footage. But it doesn’t hurt to speculate, does it?

Some suggestions were made that I do this at GDC (the game developers’ conference). But the fact of the matter is, GDC is basically about money and design, not history. The less history the better. I’d like the group who see a premiere to be a bunch of text adventure fans composing of some game designers, not the other way around.

The event would likely have a bunch of Infocom and text adventure people at it. It would be nice if it was somewhere big, since that way more people could enjoy it. It will probably be in Boston, I guess, because of so much text adventure stuff there, specifically Infocom but there’s a tradition in this location anyway.

Decisions, decisions.

Update: A friend of mine has stepped forward and proposed a Boston-area event with lots of support that will be quite exciting and interesting. I think that wins. Bear in mind, people suggesting other events, that I don’t mean I will be showing it once and then never mentioning it again; I will happily be promoting it and going to events to show it. I hope the whole world sees it! Well, OK, most of the world.

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