ASCII by Jason Scott

Entry written on August 10th.

If you were saying to yourself “Now, where can I browse over 1,700 arcade manuals in PDF format?“, your prayers were just answered. This is over three gigabytes of manuals, schematics, and general information about arcade machines, scanned in by an anonymous army of dedicated people, and going back up to 30 years.

My collection was previously at around 300, but that initial collection was from a different source, and the filename structure isn’t compatible with what I got in my latest set. So I’ve knocked it to a separate section from the main collection. They are likely doubles, and I’ll deal with that in the future.

The collection is one I got from usenet newsgroups months ago, and I just hadn’t gotten around to throwing it onto the site. I now have scripts that deal with this sort of stuff quicker, and so here we are. The filename structure of the current set is in what’s called “TOSEC Format”. TOSEC stands for “The Old School Emulation Center”, but at this point TOSEC format covers a ton more than just old-school game ROMs, which is what it was designed for. Here’s the document explaining TOSEC format, and since it’s not handled by any standards group in the typical fashion, it’s subject to some modifications, but also isn’t overloaded by nerds trying to break the thing in half to satisfy commercial interests.

I find the TOSEC format really easy to understand. If a filename says “Mario Bros [Schematics] [English]”, you know what you’re getting. Most of my stuff is in “8+3” format, that is, eight characters, a dot, and then three more characters. I wish TOSEC was available for this other stuff as well, but we do what we can with what we have.

Arcade manuals are this fascinating thing to me; as a kid I can count on one hand the times I came into contact with one, and somehow I thought they held all the secrets to the game. If I could just understand what these crazy schematics meant, I’d beat the game handily, truly master it.

I can even remember my first manual. You never forget your first manual; mine sits on a shelf just behind my head in my office. It was for Asteroids, and I swiped it out of an abused, dying, broken Asteroids machine at a dude ranch my dad brought his kids to. The back of the machine was open, agape, and I saw the little book on the floor of the machine and thought there it is, the key to mastering this machine. So somehow I got it into my jacket and home in a suitcase without dad noticing.

Now, of course, one merely has to grab the manual off my site; the dude ranch has been completely stricken from the equation.

What shocked me, going through the manual back then, was how it was possible to set up the coin return for different currencies, and the fact that you could manipulate dip-switches on the machine to make it run differently. This should have been obvious, but there you go, it blew me away at the time.

Enjoy the manuals, watermark free, ready to go. Now let’s make those games work!

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Entry written on August 9th.

Philosophy Chat Time. These never go well for weblog entries, but it can’t hurt.

I have a lot of friends who show me stuff they’ve worked on, or intend to send out there, or which is out there and they want me to review. I get sent a lot of stuff from my friends because they want me to see it, and I’m always open to checking stuff out.

One problem is that if something isn’t so good, I let them know. I’m not entirely into the whole “encouragement” thing where you lie and say something is good and it isn’t. I think this isn’t being a good friend. I’ll certainly give my reasons why I think it’s not so good and what I’d do to improve it, of course. But still, it can be a bit surprising to some of my buddies when something shows up and I say it’s sub-par.

The difference of opinion in here is whether your thing is you. I don’t think it is. Your thing is something you made and it’s likely it reflects a lot of what you are, but it also reflects how you go about making things. And sometimes that’s not so hot.

My one thing I will do if I don’t like a thing is to not mention it at all, that is, not officially come down on it anywhere. I figure that’s the least I can do. So perhaps that’s an error or slight of omission, but we’re talking about friends here.

The flip side of this is that when I see something I like, I really go off about it, sometimes for weeks. I shove your creation in the face of everyone I see, I write reviews and promote it, and I constantly throw people towards the item if I think they’ll be improved by it. I do this all the time, serving as some go between between neat people and neat crap.

I’ve sometimes had to deal with the cold shoulder for a few weeks or months, but I’d rather that be the case than for someone to walk out into the wide world thinking a project has my seal of approval and completely support. And when people hear me praise something of theirs, they know it’s the real deal.

This has been another Philosophy Chat.

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Entry written on August 9th.

Frontalot finally released my video of his text adventure song. However, a caveat: you have to be a member of his Valued Sucker Program to grab a copy. So, for the moment it’s “out there” but only in a limited fashion.

Remember, this thing is ending up on the GET LAMP final DVD set, with a high-def version available besides a typical DVD viewable one, so it’s not like it’ll never see the light of day as a fully-available thing. It’ll also be licensed Creative Commons NC-SA, so you’ll be able to pass it around at that time, in 2008.

I was sent a very breathless fan mail that went to Frontalot, which was under the impression that the mass of stuff behind Frontalot was his own basement; whoops no, that mess is mine, and that’s all part of my various collections I’ve been getting over the years. Frontalot brought his costume and his dancing skills and the rest is all my own junk.

I’ve covered this whole project extensively over the last few months, so I’ll just show you a cool picture. Here’s my favorite shot that one of the crew took of the shoot:

Proof I did the actual shooting of the video, I guess. But also showing how things look differently from a few feet back when you’re constructing an artifice.

People are now seeing it! Hope they’re enjoying it.

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Entry written on August 8th.

For years the most popular textfile on textfiles.com was the dependable and old-school ASCII Middle Finger. It definitely continues to reign as the most searched-for phrase that leads people to the site. There’s over a dozen files scattered throughout the directories that would answer the call for a text-based flip-off, so a bunch of them share the load as far as serving up the most requests. I consider them a group to be counted together, for the sake of accuracy. This has been the case for pretty much the whole life of the site.

But we have a new winner these days: Koalas are Little Bitches.

I was sent this file a couple of years ago. I talked to the uploader at length and can attest that it has been presented to me that this file is really what it says it was; an as-accurate-as-possible transcription of an 8th-grade student’s essay. The person I spoke with got it from the student’s teacher. I will not give more details than that, as it doesn’t ultimately matter if the thing is real or not, because it’s pretty damn funny. But as far as I know, this is a the real deal.

I’ve been in this kid’s position, which is why it resonates with me (and probably with the thousands of readers a month who get sent to it). A stupid, fill-in-the-idea essay where you’re tossed a dog of a writing assignment, and made to come back with the necessary 200 words to make the teacher happy. Every once in a while, that same frustrated outlook on life bubbles over and you toss a grenade over the fence, going for absolute broke. Start with an insane position, toss in a little profanity, dash off some insults, and boom, a nice little blow-off of energy before going back to TV.

Koalas aren’t hard they some little bitches. They start climbing up the tree soon as they see a deer from like 50feet away. They stupid as hell they should put their brain in their pouch and put the kid in they ten they’re be able to think better. They try to be in the fucking kangaroo family. They weak as hell, talking bout they got a pouch a kangaroo so they their cousins and shit. Kangaroo’s have some big ass legs and whot do a koala got? Some little ass legs, they tails is little and weak as fuck kangaroo’s got a big ass long tail that can kill a fucking koala.

Faced with describing why he should save a species, he instead blows out into an all-out turf war among animals, revealing what we all knew: Kangaroos are the shit.

This is a long way from BBS textfiles in some fashion, if for no other reason than this is from 2004, but in other ways it fits right in. Compare the all-koalas-must-die writing style with this collection of sadistic ideas from exactly 20 years earlier (1984) and you see how they sort of come from the same place; a kid writing crazy-ass stuff to blow off some steam. Generations apart, they’re indications this isn’t an aberration or a kid in need of a mass of drugs, but someone who decided to have a little fun in his writing.

And really, the kid’s right. Koalas are little bitches.

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Entry written on August 8th.

Someone pointed out a MajorBBS torrent to me. I’ve downloaded that particular collection and put it up on the BBS Software collection. The directory with the files that I got is here. Specifically, the zip file has the jaunty name of “MBBS4EVER”, that kind of overly ambitious and breathless filename I like to see on a collection.

It’s quite a collection, too; probably would have fetched a pretty penny way back when (1992-1994 era software). The listing is here, and you can see the effort put in to make a “complete” collection, or at least one where any reasonable person wouldn’t complain about the contents being lacking in any way. I especially like the “how-to” and “R&D” portions of the descriptive text, where the compilers tried different configurations with the software. This is meant to run in the present day.

I interviewed Scott Brinker for the BBS Documentary; he’d left the company many years previous but had a great collection of memories and feelings about that time. He’d moved on and not moved on, which is the kind of blend anybody who cares about what they do should have. Those hours of interview will get up on the archive.org collection soon. It was one of the best, which is why his interview is all over the final work.

I also dedicated the MAKE IT PAY episode to Tim Stryker, who created MajorBBS, ran Galacticomm, and then retired and committed suicide.

Galacticomm as an entity still exists; the webpage is over here and doesn’t give a full listing of the large, interesting history of Galacticomm. This important task is instead being done to near perfection by themajorbbs.com, which is collecting photographs, histories and software related to MajorBBS and its company. They have documents that I’ll probably swipe for my own collection, including customer letters and announcements.

I wish there was more in the way of efforts like this to preserve the history of BBSes, but some were definitely one-person affairs with less than a few dozen adherents. More than once I’ve been told by an author that the copy of the BBS I scraped up is one the original author doesn’t even have any more.

The search never ends for these little artifacts. It’s delightful when I see others down in the woods with me.

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Entry written on August 8th.

Some time ago, I started a project to capture all the photographs taken at hacker conventions/conferences, with “hacker cons” being defined as “things I would attend and not feel out of place at”. There were disparate places where people had collections of stuff up, photos they’d taken, but they were all over the place and the history was in danger of being lost and the rest.

It’s been a big failure. There’s a website up at conphotos.org and conphotos.com, but you’ll see it’s kind of half-assed, an example of a work-in-progress with little obvious work done (even though a lot was done). This directory is clickable, and a few others are as well.

I was working on a system to tag photos with the names of who was there, ways for people to add comments, ideas for nomenclature. You know, basically flickr except when I started this project there wasn’t really a flickr to talk about.

What there was and what I was trying to emulate was Slengpung, the demoscene party photo collection. It has everything I’d wanted, from being able to search by party, attendee, and year, all the way through to commentary and a strong sense of style. It’s really done very well, and I couldn’t even hope to get there.

Along the continuum of my projects, CONPHOTOS is like that part of the attic behind a bunch of boxes that you never, ever quite get to, even if you’re in a cleaning mood. I see how much advancement has been made in the world of photo albums online, and I sense nothing but a pile of reinvented wheels, each more crappy and non-round than the previous, while entire teams of people are working on similar sites.

Another problem is that this thing was really for my buddies; photos of my buddies, photos of conventions I liked, photos of places that I considered worth having photos of. While that sometimes works, the fact is that the way to do a site like this is for all conventions, be they anime, sci-fi, marketing, boats, medical supplies, and so on. And then it’s basically a busines. And then I’m basically in hell.

Also, I find people are really nutty about photos. Mirror them locally and they go nuts, bitter about ownership and stolen souls and what have you. It’s really more trouble than it’s worth. And on top of everything else, people take a lot of shitty photos.

The project has been on hold for years, probably one of my biggest regrets, and one that reminds me of making sure you have even the slightest idea where you want to “go” with something.

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This fellow appears in the BBS Documentary in several places. He talks about phone codes and dialing to new places using phreak codes, and he happened to be talking when someone in the background fell off their chair and it ended up in a blooper reel on the DVD. He asked to be called “Ratphun” on the documentary. He generally called himself “Rat”. He also called himself “Gthckrayon” and, on very rare occasions, “Ross LaMora”, his actual name.

We did the interview in 2002, and a couple years back he stopped by the booth I had at a DEFCON and we chatted for a bit, about how things were going. Things seemed to be going pretty well for both of us.

This past Friday, Ross died. He is the third person I’ve interviewed who’s no longer with us, after John Sheetz and Jeff “Ninjalicious” Chapman. I suppose at some point this will all get easier for me, but not yet.

My intention is to put all the interviews up as time permits. As people are discussing him and remembering him, I thought it appropriate to push his interview up to the top of the line. It was conducted for 12 minutes on July 13, 2002, at the H2K2 hacking conference.

Click here to watch. This is in Windows Media Format, and will be converted to other formats soon.

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In high school, I had a particularly memorable social studies teacher named Mr. Damon.

His approach to classes was to have a monologue. This monologue lasted the entire semester and was punctuated by the ending and beginning of classes. I am not being exaggerative to say that many classes began with us sitting down, him starting where he left off and then continuing until the bell. His opinion, as far as I can tell, was that the school year was way too short and if we only had classes with him for x number of hours, then it was critical to fill 98% of those x hours with monologue. I got a lot of facts in those classes, of variant amounts, but one could not argue we weren’t given enough information to work with.

He had no real notes, no overriding theme; he would start in the beginning and head on through, describing history, social trends, important figures. He was on rails, mostly, but his information was aligned ahead of time enough for him to be able to jump off these rails and then click right back in where he last left off.

One memorable exchange was when the overhead florescent lights blinked. He continued as if nothing had happened, until he hit a break point, an end of a paragraph. Then:

“Did anyone else see the lights blink?”

Kids murmured ascension or said yes or nodded.

“Good. I wasn’t sure if I was having a heart attack.” And then he went right back into the monologue.

Anyway, one line of his from way back then stuck in my mind. He was talking about, as I recall, perspective on history and time, and what that meant in understanding events. And he spontaneously went off about our youth.

At the age of 15, he explained, we had no perspective, no idea what decades were, what that meant; they were just words to us, time not yet something behind us, but before us. So when we were covering events and relaying years and time as measurements, we, the students, had to do our best to gain perspective on things that in many cases took multiple iterations of our lives to complete.

And then he kicked back into the monologue.

This idea has stuck with me, and now, in my late 30s, it’s nice to start thinking of things that way. Being online 25 years ago. Having friends for a quarter century. Being a decade out of college, a decade and a half out of high school.

So too, I run into people who talk to me who were born in 1990. Or who didn’t get online until textfiles.com had already started. Or who ask me questions that I can recall being at, that their parents hadn’t even met yet. It helps me when I talk to people who feel the same way about me, this guy who wasn’t even born when they did the thing I am interviewing them about, or where I was a tiny voice enjoying their work and now am asking them the questions, what will stand as their record for what they did.

It’s sad, of course, to think of my life plummeting towards its end, and being years ahead towards that unwanted goal. But in the meantime, I am enjoying the view backwards. It has become wide, vast, and varied. It was once anything but, and I remember that, decades ago.

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There are a number of pithy, quickly cliche’d statements that nest in various weblogs. Some are dead on arrival, annoying the living crap out of me in milliseconds, while others are, for a shining moment, insightful and funny before being blurred and beat down into meaninglessness.

Responding to events of spam, hacking attempts and commercialization with a variant of “This is why we can’t have nice things.” falls under the latter, until probably later this afternoon. I’m already in the red zone bringing it up myself.

Sometimes the statement is used to describe a dog, child or other entity ruining an actual nice thing you own; I’m not speaking to that. I’m mostly talking about where someone responds to an online community or entity taking it in the shorts. “I checked in last night and found the server had been hacked and vandalized. This is why we can’t have nice things.”

I like this line specifically because it belies, in itself, a number of implications.

First, that we are all in this together; that the experience of being online and transferring data bonds us in ways that, finally, all that hype from the 1980s was trying to promise us. You can now stand outside in a lot of towns, hold up a little handheld device, and send a near-instant message to someone halfway across the world. You can type in a fragment of a song you heard on the radio and get, usually, the entire lyrics of the song and who made it. And you can discover, a thousand times over, what people generally look like when they’re naked. Right now.

The downside, of course, is that this abundance of “stuff” is also accompanied by an abundance of “shit”. But not just a case of there being piles of stuff and piles of shit; no, no. In fact, we tend to combine the stuff and shit together, marbling it like a good cut of steak. You read someone’s informative page, and they’ve striped it up and down with google ads. You do a search for something you’re trying to track down, and you find it… or at least pieces of it, sitting on a spam weblog that is trying to lure you in to buy crap. Or kill you, I’m not sure.

The implication with “we can’t have nice things” is also that there are nice things to have. This is the positive statement inside the negative one; that people constantly add new and nice things, and everyone gets a shot at the new thing, for a while anyway. And we have a huge collection of new and nice things, 24 hours a day, joining our lives assuming we don’t mind the medium of the computer screen and keyboard/mouse to interact with them, as opposed to taking a walk.

So why is this at all interesting? Good question.

This weblog functions, among other things, as a collection of stop-frames in a continuum of ideas I have fermenting in a pile; things I’ve learned or think will become more and more critical over time. I was struck, during the BBS Documentary, from my interview with Phil Becker, who had done work for NASA, was involved with TBBS, Fidonet, Boardwatch/ONEBBS CON, and the IPAD (the IPAD deserves a bunch of history in itself). Phil, you see, has a gift for seeing the next thing to aim his skills at. He’s done very well with that so far. He thinks the current critical area is in digital id, a non-exploitable (to whatever level possible) identity that allows you to take it consistently between various locations and still be verifiable. I think that’s a pretty accurate way of looking at things.

So I think, personally, that the aspects of online life are now collapsing on each other, and that issues are arising that even Nicholas Negroponte in his most cranked-out Wired back page articles could not have imagined. There was once a time, after all, when people were starving, just absolutely famished, for constant incoming information that they could access easily. That’s hardly the problem now, isn’t it? The storm of crankiness about Google Maps putting up street photos (which was preceded by many other cases of sites like Microsoft, Amazon/A9 and Yahoo putting up street photos) outlines the dual problems of issues arising and obvious lack of preparation for those issues.

So this situation of us not being able to have nice things is going to get even more intense, and we’re going to have even more situations of getting nice things, and maybe we should get on that.

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So, the good news is that, due to a late change from the Defcon organizing staff, I am no longer worried about being scheduled opposite Dan Kaminsky.

Now I’m merely scheduled after him. Same room. I wonder if our audiences are even the same?

Just to talk a little about how I approach these presentations, especially in a space I’ve never spoken in before:

I make a point of always “walking the room” a couple times before my slot. Just a few pacings back and forth on the stage will help me realize where I need to look, what needs to be focused on, how the crowd will regard me. With DEFCON only in the second year in the new location, and this being the first year they’ve basically stretched out (there was, of all things, a dart-playing convention sharing space last year), it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

So instead of Friday at 9pm, I am speaking on Saturday at 2pm. So there we go.

And here’s the DEFCON schedule with all the various speakers listed in it. Five speaking tracks… that’s a lot of tracks.

As mentioned earlier, I will be at the Classic Gaming Expo this coming weekend, then I fly back to Boston to see Negativland perform, then I fly BACK for Defcon. This is crazy, but I’m a pretty big Negativland fan.

And speaking of speaking, the Black and White Ball in the UK was cancelled, meaning I composed a big historical speech on ARC vs. ZIP and have nowhere to give it. Maybe someone with a tiny conference would like it done there. Write in.

(A better set of entries for next week, I promise.)

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