ASCII by Jason Scott

As leaves fall from a tree in Autumn, so fall the many possible lessons we may teach each other this day, Internet Warrior. Let us grab one leaf, and regard it, concentrating on the colors it seeks to provide us instead of the myriad others we could spend our existence chasing, for naught.

Today we shall use the popularity of the internet forum against itself, to our own glory. We shall sit and attend to The One-Word Strike.

Where once the postings of a forum were few, precious, and standing as glittering stones in a desert, now our most popular forums know nary a passing second or moment before a new message falls to earth. A blink of a man gazing into the sun is all the time needed to yield a torrent of words from all lands.

Quickly, hence, come the messages, some of poor quality and some of the highest craftsmanship. Yes, your enemies are subtle and many, and therefore any gambit you attend to must claim the shortest of preparations. A one-word message will enable you to contribute without contributing; making the most important part of your message known to the others: your username. You are a part of the groundswell while spending the least amount of time on being so. Your name will reign in the heaven of early posts instead of the underworld of me-toos.

Let us prepare our litany of one-word posts, Warrior. Repeat after me.

Brilliant!!

First!

Pass.

Cool!

Nah.

And finally, our most effective strike of all:

.(A single period, as to indicate an agreement)

Yes, Internet Warrior, you catch on quickly; in this momentary passage of effort, barely the cost of a breath, you have taken the conversation by the neck and made it your own. The warriors who follow you are lessers, contributing whatever may come, but who only serve as a cacaphony of geese honking deliriously after stumbling past your zen-like attendance.

As such, we see we win with barely a move.

Well done, Internet Warrior. Please help yourself to a second can of cola.

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It is an honor and a personal pleasure to serve you today, Internet Warrior, in the guise of teacher. I may be called the teacher, but we are both teachers, and both students. Learned and learning, known and yet to know; this is the circle of the education that we will dive into, with vigor and respect.

I will make you aware, as you might already be aware within you, of five deadly techniques of Internet Warriors, passed down from generation to generation. As the screen shields our faces from the harsh light of observation, so too can it be a channel to strike your enemies from lands both afar and within arm’s reach. We will discover one technique a day.

Today’s technique is infantalizing your quarry. This is one of the Internet Warrior’s most tried and true techniques, dating far back, far before the Internet Warriors first struck out online, far past the day of the nascent motorcar and the era of the crafted item, prepared for sale. It is truly a classic, never to even know the idea of “style”, much less be influenced by it or be considered in or out of it.

To infantalize your quarry is to immediately frame your opponents as being naive, unaware, adhering to their choices and beliefs out of a fiery passion of youth instead of the strength of logic and the mind. As such, the position taken by your opponent is designated as poisoned ground, unworthy to grow the seeds of belief and the stump from which to take a stand.

Let us practice together.

Nothing makes me laugh harder than to hear the fanboys spout off about shit they don’t know the first thing about. If you’d put down your little fanboy sunglasses, you’d do a little research and buy some real equipment. Until then, enjoy your little toys while the professionals get the job done.

Excellent, Warrior. You block off the opponent before they have a chance to speak; all their words are wasted defending the tools instead of beginning to declare their skills. A wise and patient person will realize that to defend tools with words instead of deeds is a vacuum from which no tasks will emerge; the warrior has deflected them from their own skills and they are forced to defend the skills of those who made the tools, who need no defending at all.

Let us try a more insidious infantalization.

Jesus Christ, not this crap again. I thought we were here to get something done and be a community, not waste our time going over the same old arguments. I’m unsubbing until this place grows up. If anyone needs me, e-mail me.

Yes, yes! Your moves are harsh, swift, and deft, Warrior. Note how you declare the nebulous enemy around you as the source of the problem, declare the battleground a lost cause, and walk away unscathed. You have had to expend no effort on the bridging of communication with others; instead you have succeeded in filtering for the opponents who will follow your directions, and come hat in hand to your doorstep. Well played, well played.

One more for today.

Does anyone else even HAVE one of these? It’s getting a little tiring talking about this stuff without anyone being able to post a picture of their stuff and what they’re up to. I’ve been using one for some time now, and at least I know I have more to learn. If you don’t know, don’t post.

Perfection! You have cleaved off the users who could possibly stand up to you by indicating that unless they fulfill a set of requirements you have designated, they are not properly prepared to engage you in conversation. You are the driver of the thread, the warrior who stands unmoved at the head of the table and who will now declare what portions your less-worthy companions are entitled to have. You have made them children, mute lessers who will be considered crybabies if they question you.

You have learned well today, Internet Warrior. Commence your supper and mucking out of the floppy disk piles and then you may sleep and await tomorrow’s lesson.

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This entry filed on August 29th.

So a while ago, I wrote an essay about problems I saw with Wikipedia. Later, I gave a speech with the same name and some of the same general ideas, but in a different direction for a lot of details. It was well regarded.

By well regarded, I mean that I got a lot of positive feedback from people in mail, and I got a lot of weblog postings about it, and I got a lot of discussion that cropped up when I went to events. Because of it, I got flown to England to give a similar talk, and I’ve written some amount of stuff afterwards in the same subject and people said they would listen because here was the guy who wrote the previous speech. One of my buddies transcribed the speech and so it reached a lot of people that way. Anil Dash said some nice things about it.

This is all subjective, but it seems to be a pretty okay little speech.

The Internet Archive page is the easiest way to listen to me giving the speech to the audience. It has the audio file in a bunch of optional methods, including streaming it and downloading it. It went up there about April of 2006. It’s been downloaded over 4,000 times.

So over the course of the last year and four months, people have utilized the “review” function on the Internet Archive version 4 times. Once in December of 2006, and then three times on August 20, 2007.

The three esteemed reviewers of 20th the August, honors “clumpy”, “Don’t listen”, and “6JJJJJJ”, each provide a different insight into the talk. Here they are:

Reviewer: 6JJJJJJ – 1 out of 5 stars – August 20, 2007
Subject: No. it isn’t

Not really very good, as reveiwed, Jason doesn’t come across very well, kinda half baked. Best use your time for something else, I wish I had.

Reviewer: Don’t listen – 1 out of 5 stars – August 20, 2007
Subject: Dumb

Jason Scott is great? I don’t think so.. anyone that uses swear words, bad analogies and labels
(“Spain exports this crap…”, “liberals say this…”)
He tries to use an analogy that “superviruses” are developed through the use of anitbiotics, and they can;t be killed. Maybe he should use Wikipedia to find out that antibiotics have NEVER worked against viruses, only bacteria.
The orator is a clown, with flawed reasoning, poor thinking habits, and a potty mouth.
Skip this if you have a brain.

Reviewer: clumpy – 5 out of 5 stars – August 20, 2007
Subject: Wikipedia is no good!

Here is why! A must listen for any person with a brain that can read this sentence.

Fantastic. I’ll say it again. Fan-fucking-tastic. I’ve read a lot of verbiage involving criticism of the talk. I’ve read some stuff that does a pretty good job of tearing it apart, although often it’s because they don’t agree with my base premises instead of finding faulty logic within the actual construction of the speech. But here, on the speech itself, we now have three numbnuts who get to have the final word and commentary, right on the same page.

I say three because even “clumpy” isn’t doing any favors to my “side”; his declaration that this thing is good for everybody is about as ill-formed a declaration as saying my speech was filled with flawed reasoning and I’m a clown. But guess what! They’re on there, I can do little about it without being a complete mail-the-admins asswipe dork that any reasonable website hates, and there we go.

Contrast this with the amazon page for the BBS Documentary which contains 19 reviews of the work, with variant amounts of stars, and also ratings for the reviews themselves; top-rated reviews bubble to a prominent location, less-well-rated ones go to the side. Additionally, commentary is allowed on each of the reviews, a feature I utilized myself for one of them. The criticism was well-written, and my response treated it with the best respect that I could while fundamentally disagreeing.

Maybe it’s Amazon’s need to think of liability while balancing input from the audience that makes their forums feel better. Maybe archive.org’s just been focusing on handling the torrent of data and hasn’t had the resources to consider the implications of anyone-can-blort with regards to the items in the library. But when I spend weeks preparing a speech, deliver it to a crowd, and then go through the effort of cleaning it up and getting it uploaded and properly demarcated on the archive.org, the ease at which “6JJJJJ” can just say assery and walk away is a slap in the face.

The thing is, “Don’t Listen”‘s criticism about the “superviruses” versus bacteria mistake is accurate; it was a clear mistake, which I have been known to make. It doesn’t kill the underlying argument, that a hotbox environment for trolls produces more sophisticated and insidious trolling. But unfortunately this nuanced observation is wrapped in a useless review that represents the only one made by the person, using an account called “Don’t Listen” that doesn’t inspire confidence in further reviews of items.

The concept of “Web 2.0” is apparently here to stay for a while. I can live with that, quite happily in fact, since I’m a fan of forum communication. But advances that are obviously being made across the field are not becoming default expectations for vital user-interfacing aspects, like commentary and reviews. That’s a real shame; we’ve learned a lot in the last 25 years and I think it’s time to start expecting more from people jumping into the fray.

Archive.org can expect to continue to get the items I’ve been preparing to upload to it, of course, but it’s a small stab at the heart to consider how easily a 24 hour period can turn a work of pride into a platform of abuse.

6 Comments

This entry filed on August 29th.

A while ago, I got an e-mail from somebody. It was pretty short. It went like this:

To: Jason
From: Guy
You should have more women in GET LAMP

I love these sorts of criticisms because the complaint is right there, the sum total of the communication. No hemming or roundabout language; just the clear directive that documentary needs women.

I get some snide commentary over time, along the lines of how many guys are in the BBS Documentary and how many guys are in the GET LAMP interview photo list so far. This is said derisively, as if I’m either avoiding women, or this is all a commentary on women, or that the documentary wouldn’t be worth seeing if it didn’t have more women.

I would hope this would be self-evident, but I really don’t choose or not choose people based on what their genetic makeup is, any more than their income level or favorite OS or whether they ever rode a roller coaster. There’s just no point to that approach. In fact, I take it further and wherever I can, I interview people who others tell me I shouldn’t. Either their personality is known to be abrasive, or they’re considered to not be in sync with the outlook on subject matter, or whatever. I still interview them, if I can. I’ve had “critical” interviews turn out to be zeros and last-minute sessions turn out to be the source of amazing material.

So when I don’t have a lot of women in the documentaries, it’s just a case of there not being a lot of women that my normal research and communication has brought up. I’m not avoiding women, but I’m not ignoring all potential interviews to only interview women, either.

My completely-made-up estimate is that a lot of the videogame industry now is a 70-30 split of male-female, with the ratio getting more male-oriented as you go towards “prestige” jobs, like Lead Designer and Person Who Gets On the Cover. In contrast, my made-up estimate was that it was 90-10 in the early 1980s. You have prominent game designers like Roberta Williams, Dona Bailey, Carol Shaw and Anne Westfall, and then six billion guys. It’s just how the thing rolls.

I think making up ratios and quotas that have to be held to in a documentary would be even worse than a failure to include specific voices from a group. (But still better than intentionally avoiding groups simply to make something more marketable or because of some internal bias against that group.) It’s a sticky situation, but I can promise that whatever the ratio for my next couple of films, it will not be because of some internal goal-set of getting more of any group in there to be “fair”.

I hate talking about stuff this way, but there you go, nobody’s plotting over here to kick the ladies out of the clubhouse. And nobody’s kicking guys out of the clubhouse to make way for any potential ladies, either.

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Well, if we’re going to talk like I should give lessons on presentations, I might as well show what one of mine looks like. This is the shortest presentation I’ve ever given, a 7 minute whirlwind I gave at Shmoocon 2007, on the One Laptop Per Child panel presented on the last day. I’ve blasted it into Youtube, again, because I don’t particularly care about the quality being perfect. If you want the full presentation in MPEG4 quality, just head over to either the shmoocon 2007 video collection or my mirror of same.

The circumstances of this situation were that I proposed a talk to Shmoocon, and they responded with whether I’d like to co-present with two other guys. I said yes and then they added a fourth guy, and we were assigned about an hour and change to present. Because of that, I collapsed anything I had into the 3rd presentation, and instead gave a short introduction to why anyone should be spending time punching the One Laptop Per Child project in the face when it’s trying to do so much good. This is useful to know because I wanted to keep good time so we didn’t run over, and so I was rather rushed in how I dropped stuff in. I expected it would be 15 minutes, and it clocked in at less than half that. All of us did similar, and I think it’s great how we ended up doing that.

In my presentation, I give at least one wrong piece of information: I say the flood happened on a summer day, and in fact it was just an unseasonably warm winter day. So don’t write in. Also, I cut out a lot of the intermediate steps of the AC-DC war for time reasons. Otherwise, it is what it is.

Introducing us is Bruce Potter. Bruce is a fantastic speaker, a perfect alpha-male voice combined with a solid sense of timing and riding the audience, which is not coincidentally what I do as well. When either of us talk, you can hear us react to the audience, blowing out to tangents as needed but then snapping back as quick as we can.

So here that is on youtube. Again, these are just the parts with me or referencing me.

Several things to note about my talk (other than what’s above):

• The opening joke was on my burner with an alternate opening if I thought it wouldn’t fit. I decided it fit and went with it, but I had a backout plan for a more “appropriate” line of statement.
• My list is intentionally weird and unexplained for a while. This was to draw the audience in and the “mystery” of why these three things are mentioned is meant to bring the audience through the boring parts, if any.
• A portion of it is unscripted; I hear the joke the same time as the audience. The whole line starting from “As soon as you see one of these” to “muffin of Africa” is complete improvisation and I heard it for the first time as I said it. Similarly, wrapping it up with “muffin of your lands” was me revising the talk as I went to end on such a positively-reacted-to turn of phrase. I had a different ending.
• Compare how much I spend checking my notes with looking out at the audience. This is the opposite ratio I see in a lot of speeches and it’s probably my least favorite thing to watch.
• I also have no powerpoint or any accompanying presentation for the screen; it’s all me. This is my style but that doesn’t work for everyone.
• The mooninites joke and the barbie aside were improv as well, reading the “feel” of the audience. And again, I heard them at the same time the audience did.
• Also note that when whoever it was who interrupted me finishes, I don’t engage them in conversation but go right back on track. They shouldn’t have stopped me midflow and any additional time I spent engaging them in talking was wasted time for the other hundreds of attendees (I believe there were roughly 600-700 people in the room).
• The whole talk started with the words “fatal hilarity”.

One last thing. I presented on this panel with Ivan Krstic. I think that in 20 years I will get free food and drinks because I will be able to say I presented on the same panel as Ivan Krstic. I also presented with Sean Coyne and Scott Roberts, and I’ll probably get at least a few drinks off of saying I presented with them as well.

4 Comments

The wave of interest in my Arcade Manuals collection has not subsided; in fact, it’s kind of held firm the last few days, to the point that people are complaining about a general textfiles.com slowness. Over 200 gigabytes of arcade manuals have shot into the hands of over 20,000 people. That’s crazy.

Crazy good, I hasten to add. It’s amazing how many people were curious, wanted to read these manuals, maybe just wanted to see what one was, to get a copy of it and maybe immediately throw it out. Some, I’ve noticed, have begun just downloading the full-on pdf.textfiles.com site, apparently worried that it’s going to disappear in a few days and so they better get the shots in. You nutty kids, things are going just fine and I don’t expect any trouble for some time to come. The fact that there were so many people who wanted these things, for whatever reason, and I was able to bring it to them, that’s pretty amazing and makes me very happy.

But here’s the thing; none of it is particularly special.

First of all, there’s a better organized arcade manual site out there, arcarc.xmission.com (the ARCade ARChive). It’s been around for years, and except where a couple companies made them take crap down, they’ve got stuff really amazingly arranged. If I ever get my hands on the DVD images, I’ll mirror it, but still this is their bag and they’re great at it. Along a similar vein, the arcade manuals I have scanned are named according to the TOSEC convention and were obviously part of someone else’s collection; I don’t know if it was browsable but it likely was and is. With a modicum of effort, I stumbled onto sites that offer this stuff in Bittorrent form as well. In other words, I added a bunch of stuff to my site but I definitely didn’t add anything new to the network at large. It was there before and now it’s still there.

What happened, though, was that I got publicized in a few places, those places got linked from other places, and I won the “lottery”. But really, it was nothing special, just what got the attention of the herd that day.

Similarly, I got some attention for an entry I did on the 1980 Coleco Catalog, which was a caalog intended for distributors to choose the toys for the coming season. I got it from a flea market, haggled for it, and thought here, I’d saved something from oblivion, I’d done new work.

But no! There’s this site that totally kicks my catalog’s ass. Granted, it focuses entirely on the handhelds and not the other toys, but they do the handhelds really well. From this page, you get a link to this page which has a rare prototype for this promised game that never materialized! That’s dedication. But meanwhile you can do a google search for “Coleco” and my scan of the catalog is on the first page, right next to handheldmuseum. I don’t deserve that!

But this all highlights the cool part: this happens all the time. Instead of there being “the” handheld site, or “the” scanned catalog site, or “the” arcade manual site, tons of this stuff is everywhere. Even when one becomes a “hit” on the aggregate sites, that doesn’t preclude the fact that often the information is in tons of places, ranging from easy to rather difficult to suss out.

And beyond that, there’s stuff that you might want that, except through randomness, serendipity and coincidence, you will bump into.

For example, here’s a scanned book of the week weblog, which is basically a review and background for a scanned book available. Once a week, they’ve been shoving in these reviews of books, many of them around for months or years on archive.org, but now presented to you to find anew, for the first time. And when you find a book, you find a full book, dozens of scanned pages from all throughout history. Stuff you probably didn’t know you would even be interested in. And so it goes.

This is a miraculous time, that we are swimming in all this input. I have my preferences for technology of the 1960s and onward regarding bulletin boards or consumer electronics. But throw a well-scanned turn of the century tome at me and I’ll browse that sucker too. Heck, show me a well-scanned anything and I’ll probably give it a few minutes of my time.

This is constant, this incoming river of stuff. It’s torrential, truly a wall of information and images being scanned and attached to the huge ball of Internet Stuff. Sometimes it gets highlighted, other times it lays dormant for years before someone “discovers” it for a larger audience. I can never hope, in my lifetime, to even begin to even be aware of a small piece of it.

I guess I’ll just have to live longer. Good to have a reason!

3 Comments

About a year ago (maybe it was longer, I forget) I was to speak at an event called OSCON about GET LAMP, the documentary about text adventures you may have heard I was working on. I took what I could of the roughly 10 interviews I’d done up to that point, mixed well, and produced a teaser trailer. I played it during my presentation to whatever the reaction was, and then left this thing to languish.

The funny thing is, it captures the sense of what I’m doing with this documentary even better than I expected, so I uploaded it to YouTube and will put it on the main site shortly.

I’m sure you’ll have your own opinions about the tone, approach and direction of the trailer, but bear in mind it was done in July of 2006, and also bear in mind that youtube’s version is really lacking in detail; considering the original footage is in high definition you can imagine the difference (and will, shortly, when I put it up on getlamp.com). Most striking to me is the second Steve Meretzky shot, where he just stands there looking at you; in the high-def you can see the camera rack focus, bringing him into focus and showing him in great detail. I have to be careful about that, making sure something doesn’t lose all meaning when knocked down to standard definition.

Music is Beth Sorrentino, “Beautiful Day”. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial, which means this trailer is licensed similarly. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the water; that’s Long Island Sound. I’ll leave the rest of the questions up to you.

5 Comments

One of the more tedious but important jobs with regards to my film is that all footage is kept on two hard drives, and additionally burned to two DVD-ROMs. This takes a lot of time but gives me a lot of grab-it options for the footage. Remember that 4 gigabytes of disk space gives me 10 minutes of HD footage, and we see what a mass of space/backup requirement is at stake here; a typical interview I conduct with someone relatively talkative will be about 30-50 gigabytes. On two drives, and two DVDs. Times 12.

While I burn this footage out, it’s not too good to excite the machine too much with other tasks. I occasionally do anyway, since I’m here, but often I answer e-mail, do artwork, write weblog entries… you know. Stuff.

I tried the last couple of days to throw some footage together from the clips library I’ve been building for GET LAMP.

This is not what I did with the BBS Documentary, but things are a little different this time around, if for no other reason than interviews are paced out by the week instead of the day, and I’ve been trying to live a full life along with doing the shooting, so I don’t feel at the end that I missed out on my late 30s. It’s a little strange to spend 3 years recounting 30, but that’s how it goes and I minimized the life impact this time around.

So what I did last time was shoot ALL the footage, then spend 5 months culling clips out of the footage, and then 3 months editing these clips into episodes. This time around, I’ve been doing culling while interviewing, so I have a pretty OK clip library so far: 520 passages from 14 of the 50+ interviews. You can do a lot with that, although obviously right now there’s a bias across whatever these 14 people said.

So I started throwing like-minded clips together, and I’m reminded, after a couple years since I did this intensely, how important timing is in editing. Like, down to individual frames.

With the Frontalot video, I just synced up 4 layers of him lip-syncing to the song to be able to turn on and off various layers at will. In other words, even though I did have to pay attention to these spans, I could choose half-phrases or middles of words or whatever I wanted and it’d match up; the soundtrack was already done, and these additional video streams were augmenting that. Not so with the footage.

With these clips, I can wait too long to cut and you hear the person breathing for the next word. You can cut too short and the person is right there, in your face, no split-second for the eye to adjust. Knock it over a frame and it’s perfect.

It helps that my clips are filled with smart people saying brilliant things. BBS Documentary had that too, but this time, even more than BBS Documentary, nearly every interview is brimming with brilliant statements made within a section of history, theory, implementation and philosophical musing. In many cases, it’s obvious I will have to decide among a not-small-set of stupefyingly insightful comments and choose the one that flows, rhythmically, with what comes before it or after it.

Everyone should have my problems.

Dates on this production are slipping, mostly because of finding those last few folks I want in on this, and making sure I don’t randomly miss huge names for no reason. A couple names are not interested and while I wish they were, footage has been shot to allow working without them. The amount and variety of folks who are either interviewed or signed up is still quite something, and I have no complaints.

One frame forward, one frame back. I’ll get this right.

5 Comments

I’ve had this rattling around for a year or so; I’d like to consider making a video on how to give presentations. I generally (generally being the key word) get good reviews on my talks, and while my specific style of spun yarns and profanity-laced rant might not be the most useful template for any given talk, the general approach I take to my speeches might have use.

I’ve sat through some pretty horrible speeches; speeches given by friends, by unknowns, by first-timers, and by what are supposed to be hardened veterans of presentation. I’ve also sat through electrifying speeches and monologues that leave me in a dreamy, energetic daze afterwards. It can go either way, but when it’s bad, oh boy is it bad.

I totally understand speeches given to get the presenter into the conference for free; that sort of chicanery is the job of the people choosing speeches to suss out and if the person gives a sub-par presentation, it’s up to the organizers if they want to invite that person back to speak again, ever. But if the person up stage honestly and truly wants to present something to the audience, and actually believes they have something new and compelling to present, then a lack of good speaking style is that much more tragic.

I would want it to be video, because it’s the visuals of a presentation, even of the presenter, that play a part. If you’re not paying attention to visuals, you’re essentially doing an audio broadcast and there’s not a lot of compelling reason for people to be in the room with you. What I find with the shows I’m involved in are that people don’t attend because the recording is more than adequate for them to get the entire “point” of the talk. If the people don’t regret missing it, then you’ve failed as a presenter.

Naturally, my calendar is chock full of day job, documentary, editing and other fun stuff, but maybe if I have time I’ll put something together. That is, if people tell me it’s worthwhile to do. I’ll ask around before I run the camera.

7 Comments