ASCII by Jason Scott

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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This past May, I found out about a horrible article about “philes” in the Fall 2006 issue of 2600. I wrote a weblog entry about this article, which was entitled “Where Have All the Philes Gone?” The upshot of my entry was that the original article wasn’t very good or accurate, and it was a shame 2600 printed it, especially considering how even basic efforts to fact-check it would have left it in the slushpile. On the urging of Flack O’Hara I sent in a version of my weblog entry to 2600 as a letter to the editor, so that it ended up somewhere.

They’ve printed it in the Fall 2007 issue. They even put a paragraph of response.

Here’s that response:

“While we understand your obvious passion for what you do, it is possible to convey knowledge of the information you provide without insulting us or our writers. People submit articles with the knowledge that they are aware of, others with additional knowledge add to this or correct the mistakes. It’s not about trying to fill pages or speaking out of ignorance. It’s a process that results in a dialog amidst the clearinghouse of information that passes through here. To us that dialog is as important as the conclusions since it gets people into a thinking mode. When you put people down for not having the same knowledge as you, then that dialog is poisoned and overshadowed by negativity. There’s already enough of that to go around, past and present.”

Ah yes. So here we go.

Make no mistake; I’ve been reading 2600 on and off for 23 years. Really. Since the beginning. I even got to go to one of the first 2600 meetings at the Citicorp center and even had the privilege of going to the aftermeeting that inevitably happens when you ditch the losers, a tradition that continues at many 2600 meetings to the present day. I consider Emmanuel/Eric a colleague if not a friend (we interact way too little for one to throw the term “friend” around). I have gone to a majority of the HOPE conferences. I’ve spoken at a few. I’m not the fuckin’ enemy.

I don’t know who writes the responses; I believe it’s a rotating set of editors but it could easily be Eric doing the whole thing, so I won’t assume either way. I will however, assume the response represents an accurate representation of the opinion of the 2600 staff.

Regarding being hostile, I can only say, “bite me in the ass”. Let’s move on.

The core of the response seems to be that 2600 magazine, to my honest surprise, does not function like a magazine, that is, a printed collection of researched articles and photographs overseen by an editorial staff and assisted by fact checkers, copywriters and researchers. Instead, apparently, it thinks of itself as a paper based forum, where each article is an entity unto itself with the responsibilities of accuracy and research incumbent upon each individual author. This is, of course, fine. But it’s not what I would have expected for a publication printed 4 times a year.

The idea that printing an entirely inaccurate article (and I must again stress, the core issue is that the article is entirely inaccurate) is a contribution to dialog… that, like lighter fluid, it functions merely to get things started and will then be improved by later interactions, is crap.

The definition of “thinking mode” surely can’t be “here is some paranoiac, historically false and chronically retarded writing…. GO”. I don’t know who or what would be inspired to go into a thoughtful contemplation upon being told that the world has closed up since the “good old days” and that you have much less access to information that you once had. This is so not true, on its face, I can barely contemplate it being something someone isn’t presenting cynically, as a talk show host drops a psychic bomb on their listeners to ensure reaction and continued audience/ratings. Simple as that; hence my reference to page-filling.

As often is the case, my own cantankerous personality is a contrast to the archives I make available, and I do my best to ensure the Fellow doesn’t affect the Files. If you don’t like me, you barely have to go by me to get to my stuff. “Negativity” is a general dismissal of efforts. There was no effort in this article. A magazine of any substance would have thanked the submitter for their contribution, smiled helpfully, and then fed it to a goat.

So while I’m here, I will say again what I hinted at in the previous entry: 2600 has made more and more effort to be utterly and completely irrelevant over time. What drives me and what surely must be a significant number of sometime-readers mad is how much potential it exudes while gleefully rejecting this potential at any turn.

In January of 2007, 2600 started an online forum. January. 2007. Yes, they had a BBS way back when, and in fact I may be one of the only sources of copies of some of the messages that ran on this BBS. It was called “The Private Sector” and wasn’t actually run by 2600, instead run by fans who 2600 lent their name to. The BBS was taken down in summer of 1985 and that’s been about it for 2600-based online discussion mediums until 2007. 22 years is a long time.

To read 2600 in PDF form, you must depend on crappily-scanned efforts, available on torrents or newsgroups. Text of old articles is not searchable; nothing is on the site to give you anything but a prideful collection of covers. 2600 certainly has a news section on its site, but it primarily informs you that a new radio show is available, a schedule that should be in its own separate location, providing it to people for whom a radio show is a preferred method of gaining new information. There is no “basics of 2600” or “basics of hacking” information on the 2600 site. There is a collection of payphones, however, although there is no information on the payphones beyond the basic information one would expect of any photo, or even Flickr. Flickr, by the way, has over 4,000 tagged photos of payphones as of this writing.

So yes, negativity, that is, pointing out something is lacking, is what I do.

Who do I think gets it right, does what I think 2600 should be doing, does it better than I could have ever dreamed? MAKE. Yes, Make, magazine of tinkering, electronics, building. Make, it of slick advertisements and owned by O’Reilly Media and published quarterly. This magazine gets it right, gets it proper, and if you blinked and missed it, has dumped more information of a quality nature in 12 issues and supplemental packages than almost all of 2600’s entire run.

How do I make such a bold statement? Well, Make is the work of, among other people, Dale Dougherty and Mark Frauenfelder, two people who know how to put a goddamned endeavor together. The magazine’s website and projects reek of endless meetings attempting to not just “get it”, but “improve it”. All issues available in PDF form for subscribers (with no limits on the PDF). RSS feeds everywhere. A weblog to accompany the magazine to get on-the-spot information to you. Forums. Accompanying books that cover the basics of electronics and building, which is vital for not repeating mistakes.

The choices of stories range wildly, from how to make simple projects a dog with a screwdriver could accomplish up through to injection molding in your kitchen or a profile of a vodka-maker and the process by which he does so.

But what of the hacking, right?

Well, the thing is that Make exudes hacking, drips from every page the excitement of creating, of assembling, of testing, and even of breaking or unexpected dead ends. The ethics and internal “heart” of hacking, instead of being constantly referred to in each article in 2600, is simply the resonance that each article provides in its writing. This comes, of course, from articles being edited, fact-checked, quality-compared, and so on. And the articles are, to some extent, timeless. News-related information is disposable as expected, but the lessons learned in how to ‘do’ stuff build on each other, such that assembling all the current issues of MAKE has inherent value, the value of a combined set of processes that give you tools.

2600’s portrayal as a martyr, distrusted by the bulk of the world and in a constant locked-horned battle with the forces of censorship and fuddy-duddies is a tired song, long bereft of its melody, an attractive glitter to children but not reflecting of a world where the wires are rapidly disappearing and a year of music fits in your pocket.

It is last century.

I am enjoying this one.

I will continue to.

I just wish 2600 was along for the ride.

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This week is catch-up week, trying desperately to get a bunch of stuff done that isn’t documentary related as well as doing my day job. I can put some things off for months, and it’s good to set a little time aside to make the calls, ship out the packages and envelopes, and generally be on the ball.

At this stage in my game I am hovering to the point where a personal assistant would make sense, but poor planning in that realm means that I simply don’t have the means to properly have one, either money wise or space wise. That’s a shame. And what a miserable person they’d be!

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So there’s some stories I like to tell.

OK, fine, there’s a lot of stories to tell. Like, I’d never run out, and if I had to fill 3 hours of talking in a conference or on a podcast or some other forum, I could just sit there and spin them out indefinitely.

Most of the stories stand out on their own. Usually, I’m an eyewitness or the progenitor or otherwise able to verify the story. Unless it’s movie trivia, which I often repeat verbatim and then find out 10 years down the road I was entirely wrong. But hey, movie trivia.

For most of the rest, I can know that the story is true and verify it. For example, I remember during my childhood I was at a snow hill on the back of a elementary school in Brewster, NY. Brewster being what it is in the intelligence soup, this snow hill went down a bunch of sizable bumps and then ultimately shot over a 6 foot wall directly into traffic. Obviously, it was incumbent upon children/teens going down this hill to veer off at some point before going off the wall onto certain death, in the path of cars going between 20 and 50 miles per hour.

So, not content to rest on the mere idea of hurling towards a road on a sled down bumpy hills, someone devised an even better idea: take a Red Ryder sled, put some inner tubes on it, and load THAT with a bunch of kids.

So there we have it, a bunch of kids perilously loaded on a sled piled on another sled, going down a very steep hill that was in fact a series of large jumps, ending in a drop-off into traffic. We did this. We piled into it and we went down this hill.

For the happiness of all involved, the sled naturally capsized after two major jumps and sent 7 kids tumbling in all directions and tumbling the sleds instead of sending them flying at top speed into some hapless driver’s passenger window.

I was there, this happened, and if I think it fits into a conversation (or weblog entry), it goes in.

On the other hand, the superchickens story was unverified, and that was a shame because I saw a neat lesson in it.

The story goes like this.

For most of the 20th century, there’s been aggressive breeding of most farmstock, be it cows, horses, what have you. This includes chickens. You take an animal that shows promise in some aspect of itself that you want, let it make lots of little friends, and the resultant baby animals are checked for that aspect. Then you let the ones with that aspect breed, ideally with others of the same quality, and so on. You watch out for inbreeding, you make sure the little suckers are happy, and so on. Pretty simple.

The result of intense breeding resulted in the Leghorn Chicken, which is heralded for its prolific egg-laying. You can get well in the triple digits with these gals, some of them laying over 300 eggs a year. This is from nearly a century of selective breeding for egg-laying abilities.

The problem is, they didn’t check a lot of the other attributes. The reason that this strain of chicken lays so many eggs is because it’s an asshole.

The chickens attack each other mercilessly. They freak out in close quarters. By breeding for egg-laying abilities, they were also breeding for meaner, huger chickens. These things are massive (for chickens) and will eat a nearby neighbor if the mood strikes it. The mortality rate is through the roof, as much as 80%.

The solution, therefore, was plain: debeak the chickens. Hundreds of thousands of these White Leghorn chickens have their beaks ripped off by machines so they won’t kill each other. Regardless, tons of them die anyway, and they can’t be jammed together in close quarters dependably.

So I had no direct links to any papers or sources about this. But now I do. Trust in the Chickens: Group Selection and Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems by Benjamin McGee Good (April 26, 2000) which specifically references the work of Muir, W.M. (1996). Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and direct responses. Journal of Poultry Science 75, (pp 447-458). Once I had that, the world opened up to me and I’ve found a lot of citations of this paper, in many locations online.

Now, why do I care about this? Because this whole situation is a perfect parable for unintended consequences. And I was inspired, some time ago, by a small rash of comparisons to chickens and Enron. Here’s a good entry on such with bonus over-the-top conspiracy theories in the comments, trying to derail the conversation! Two for one.

Anyway, it’s good to have the papers and links for my stories. They feel stronger and healthier, that way.

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The bridge is simply astounding.

I first heard about this documentary about a year ago, in bare terms which you might be first hearing too: a film guy named Eric Steel traveled to San Francisco, got a permit to film the Golden Gate Bridge for a year, and proceeded to do so. What he didn’t explain in his permit was that he was recording suicides. Utilizing a crew that shot every daylight minute of 2004, he captured 23 suicides on camera, then tracked down witnesses, family members and friends and recorded their thoughts on the jumpers’ lives and motivations. He did not tell them he had footage of their final moments.

You are some variation of aghast or intrigued. I was the latter. I also knew how wrong this project could go, or how ham-fistedly it could be handled. Recently, I saw it was on DVD, bought it, and watched it.

The Golden Gate Bridge dominates this film; shot after shot from many places show how the bridge is seen from throughout the landscape near it, one of the wonders of the modern world. You can see what draws people to it, what makes them want to walk across it, what makes it stay in their minds, even as their world grows dark, even as there’s no hope.

I do not think I would be doing this film justice to do some sort of reviewer play-by-play of what goes on in the film and coating it with my thoughts on each little decision, each little branch the film goes. I’ll keep it simple: the stories are real, the people are eloquent, the images are crisp, the emotions you feel are many.

People who make it their stock in trade to complain will complain (and have complained) about all aspects of this film: the subject matter, the ethics, the approach, the editing. This is a film about suicide, and it changed my opinions on the debate to some degree. That is a great film that does this to its audience. And this is a great film.

People will look back many years later and wonder why it was so little heralded, so slighted by its contemporaries.

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I am positive I used to be a better game player.

I was very good, I think. I was certainly pretty good at video games that required me to learn a few basic rules and then apply myself towards a bunch of simple sprites who worked in a fairly predictable manner. My control was a joystick and a button, or maybe a spinning knob, or even smattering of large buttons. I could play the games for some time, although I never would call myself a world champion. But I knew, in the grand scheme of the population of the world in raw numbers, I was in sight of the top.

Those days are over.

I play Halo 3, this newest game of newest manner, and I have my ass handed back to me with a side of potatoes. I am not being exaggerative, when I say that I play the part of the tree branch and the other players play the part of the wood chipper.

I know I can punch the person in the head and win, and I run towards them and I am dead. Half the time I don’t know why. Another half I don’t know the rules, or where I am, or who is killing me. Sometimes I don’t know what team I’m on or what weapon I’m carrying. And many, many times, I have the same general resources as someone else and yet in a person-to-person showdown I am a pancake.

Oh, sure, I could claim that I “have a life” or that there’s something genetically or mentally wrong with my opponents or I am in some way superior in some other measurements. But come on, that’s lame. The fact is, they’re better. They want it more. They practiced. They got good.

I play these multi-person melees like I do a lot of things; scooped with a dollop of humor, talking incessantly, lackadasically running through the rules and ignoring most of them, and hoping that I have some sort of golden boy luck that lets me finish the assignment having done none of the homework. So guess what. I’m not the leader of the pack. I’m not even the hunter. I’m the rabbit scurrying into the super-obvious burrow with his white tail sticking out the hole and I’m someone’s dinner.

We all want to be the hero, all want to be the person who comes in, unexpectedly, and turns into a Mozart before the very shocked eyes of our colleagues, friends and family. But it doesn’t always work that way. Here’s one case where I will not hide behind my successes of a quarter-century ago, my advancing age, or my priorities. I play this game and I am a wall mural, over and over. If I concentrated more, I might do incrementally better. But I will never be a champion, never be the top of the heap.

And so it’s up to me to be willing to not be the lead dog and still want to be on the run. And I do.

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I bought a Canon HV20 a little while ago. This is basically a handheld high-definition camera that costs $1000, with accessories. It shoots in HDV, which is a lower-bandwidth high def format that can fit on the old MiniDV tapes instead of the P2 cards I currently shoot with.

Am I moving to a new camera? No. The $6k I spent on my camera has been worth it and I’ve been getting some great shots; this new thing is for second-unit-type shots, that would put the other camera at too much physical risk, or be too cumbersome to conduct stuff with. I am then giving it to a filmmaker I’m working with, where I am helping produce a new documentary. Yes, a third one. I refuse to make the mistake I made with ARCADE and give much in the way of details.

Anyway, I took it with me to the Penny Arcade Expo, and did some test setups and shooting and the rest. Some of the still frames from that footage is here in thumbnails. I then took an MC Frontalot song about Penny Arcade and cut some of the test footage I shot. I have gone ahead and rendered it out, in the three sizes you might want: youtube, large, gargantuan.

Here’ the youtube link, which is pretty much good for getting a feel of if you’d want to download the other two.

So here’s the large size, 75 megabytes, MPEG video, 1:40.

And here’s the gargantuan size, 325 megabytes. MPEG M2T video (plays in Videolan VLC).

Bear in mind, this camera is tiny, about the size of a regular has-a-separate-lens digital camera, or a baseball. And I put it through some paces here, intentionally. I shot in low light, bright light, moving crowds, masses of flashing stuff, people walking around, and so on. I’m rather impressed with what came out.

One of the issues of the current stream of consumer level video hardware (and that’s definitely what this is) and even the I-hate-the-name “Prosumer” level is that there are certain situations where the camera’s output just doesn’t look good, specifically very low light and high-motion shots. As a result, someone shooting will end up either eating the lower quality, or shoot stuff and turn it into the look they wanted. I’ve discovered the hard way how tools can end up controlling you without knowing it, so this isn’t a good thing, although time will likely fix this. The other issue is that the sound on this is a major step backwards, taking in what’s basically a headphone jack instead of the XLR jacks I ran too after the sound issues on BBS Doc. This means that you’d have to record sound somewhat separately, which means you have to play SYNC SOUND GAMES like the old film days. That blows, but at least the solutions sitting out there, instead of you having to hack it up. One more annoying step.

Also, this footage is good for showing off PAX, which was fantastic.

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Some time ago, I wanted to license some music. I had plans for that music.

As luck would have it, the artist had heard of what I was doing in terms of a project, and he was excited, and wanted me to use his music too. He’d written it five years previously, for a band that didn’t exist any more, so what a nice way to have the music get used in a new and interesting way.

He told me I should speak to his record company, who he cc’d and told them they should let me use the music.

The record company took months to get back to me. When they did, they asked exactly what I was going to use it for.

I wrote and told them what I wanted to use it for. They took a month or so to get back to me.

They quoted me some theoretical costs for using the music, I said I could pay those.

They then explained to me (a few weeks after that, now putting us roughly six months from when we’d first made contact), that the price they gave me was going to be just for the rights for playing it at festivals, and then they told me how much it was going to be to put it on a set number of copies of DVDs, and then how much it would extend if I happened to make more than that number of DVDs, plus how much extra it would be if it ended up on TV or anywhere else other than the DVDs. The amount was more than the entire production had cost up to that moment. I passed.

Later the thing came out, and the artist asked me why his song wasn’t on the documentary anywhere. I told him, and he was really bummed. And by bummed, I mean on fire. His record company, you see, hadn’t told him they’d given me this massive price to use the music (money, by the way, for them, not for the artist). So his old song didn’t end up on my project, and he wasn’t even told what was going on.

So yeah, fuck record companies.

I mention this because I’ve had a couple similar situations with GET LAMP, where my playing things by the rules are costing me more money than I want, are making me bow and scrape to people to get the privilege of putting my money down and go through the physical effort of filming, and where I was hoping to be a beneficial entity but I am being treated like a dynamite-strapped terrorist running deep into a nursery.

This happens. I have contingency plans in place for all occasions; I never put myself in the position of having anything “completely vital” to the projects I do such that I am utterly and totally beholden to another entity’s whims, especially where it’s obvious I mean as much to that entity as a twist-tie. But people sometimes end up thinking I “forgot” to do something or I “missed out” on a situation, and in fact there’s this whole ugly screaming match or endless looping bullshit parade that represents the dull and lifeless outcome.

I mention all this because sometimes I might paint things as too easy. Way way back in film school, my kick ass film teacher explained to us how he had a friend who worked in the Industry who had a huge woodpile out in back of his house. Not because he particularly needed wood, mind you, but because sometimes, dealing with the brain donors of his daily life, he needed someplace to go and split things in half with an axe.

Everyone, if they work at something that needs the assistance of others, or even the non-obstruction of others, will find themselves stymied with what apparently is even worse than malicious sabotage but in fact in needless complication, done by people who consider inertia their personal gods. It happens. Don’t let it stop you from your stuff, just realize that what comes out the other end is rarely 100% as you dreamed it would be.

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