ASCII by Jason Scott

At a demoparty, there is often what’s called a “Wildcard” or “Wild” competition, where entrants can basically throw in anything they want to and compete for prizes. It sounds free-form, because it is. The entry can be a movie, a performance, a program, you name it, the sky’s the limit. They can get pretty out of hand. Since Blockparty was somewhat new and there was a slight concern of a lack of entries in a category, RaD Man and I made a short film called “NAC1M1”, and released it under pseudonyms. (To ensure a fairer judging, maybe, although it’s quite obvious in the film who made it.)

Basically, the title is a reference to the first level in Doom, “E1M1”, and this little short is a 2 minute parody of Doom utilizing footage of walking around Notacon (NAC) at 5 in the morning with my camera. Here’s a google video version of it. It’s a little blocky on Google Video, but you get 90 percent of the “point” immediately, so no harm, no foul.

In this case, the time from “Hey, let’s throw something together” to the video being ready for upload was about 2 hours. About 15 minutes of video was shot. The whole thing was improv, and RaD Man helped get the sound effects ripped out of a Doom WAD. That’s sort of the point of these little projects, the speed of slapping together stuff, the lack of refinement, the “go go go” and then moving onto the next big idea.

(Just to remove suspense, the video didn’t win or anything.)

Just screwing around in Vegas Video, without a long-term outlook to the project being done, is a fun way to remember how much I enjoy editing stuff and playing with footage. Jiggering things around so that the footage was funnier or lacking slow parts is the real hard part. Sometimes you have to walk away from hilarious happenings simply because they wouldn’t fit, or would get you in trouble, or otherwise make things flow less smoothly for the same of a single good shot.

Inspired Chaos, another attendee of Blockparty, snapped this photo of the two of us putting this little film together. I had not slept in a very, very long time, and it shows.

Hooray for fast filmmaking.

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There is nothing sordid here.

When I was a lot younger, probably in my single digits, I befriended a local neighbor, name of Alex. Actually, his name was Alexas. That’s an odd name for a guy to have, but that’s what he had. He had red hair, freckles, and a slightly off-kilter outlook at life. He also had a lot of really cool Atari stuff.

I didn’t have any Atari stuff, and while I did have a Commodore Pet and some other stuff my dad would borrow to bring home, it didn’t match up to Alex’s collection, which came from magic and which was, as far as I was concerned, infinite and incredible.

I would walk the half-mile from my house to Alex’s, and if I was really lucky, like super lucky, Alex would be outside in his treehouse built on poles in the back yard, or hanging out in his garage, or otherwise around where I’d get to see him first and ask if I could see his Atari. Seeing his Atari was basically my way of saying I wanted to try out some of the cool games and programs he had.

I very simply can’t come up with how I knew Alex. I don’t even know if my father knew his parents, or if we had mutual friends, or whatever. I don’t even know how I knew he had a computer; it just sprung up, as memories from childhood often do. This all happened, I just don’t know how.

Alex was smart enough not to tell this 9 year old Jason how he was getting all these programs, or why the software didn’t come in nice packages but handwritten labels, or why some of it was marked to be beta or had names different than the ones on the packages they ultimately came out in. Obviously, in some fashion, Alex was connected, but he didn’t connect me into that. Good for him. Instead, he just let me try out all these great programs… this space game from First Star Software, or the Atari port of Crush Crumble and Chomp. I played them and loved them and was blown away by graphics and sound and the whole deal. Alex was very patient with me.

I recall clearly when we booted up a copy of Caverns of Mars, and the usual message that was printed on the screen was instead a stream of profanity. Alex quickly got embarassed and switched games for me. He’d changed the game somehow! At the time I didn’t know the single first thing about disk sector editing, and so this opened my eyes that these programs, these immutable disks, had the capability to be modified and changed. An important lesson I learned then and there.

As I said, if I was lucky, I could show up and Alex would be outside. Otherwise, I’d have to ring his front doorbell, an absolutely terrifying proposition, because statistically this would mean I’d get his parents answering the door. They spoke english with a strange accent I didn’t understand, and they didn’t seem to think much of me. Looking back, I don’t think this was the case, but at the time it sure seemed so. They’d look at me carefully, and then call Alex from wherever he was in the house, and I’d stand there with nothing to show for why I was bothering them except for my desire to see the Atari again. It taught me well and truly what “awkward” was.

I hung out with Alex on and off, often in the summer, for probably a year or two, when I was visiting my Dad’s house. I got older and he eventually disappeared, although I again don’t know why. Likely he went to college or got a job or joined the army and that was that. I’d also gotten a computer of my own by this point, my IBM PC, so the world stretched out for me in its own fashion and I was no longer in need of the help that Alex provided.

Like I said, there is nothing sordid here. Alex didn’t give me drugs or touch me inappropriately or make me do bad things or take advantage of a kid probably 5 years his junior. He was patient and amused and chatty and occasionally overly quiet as any teenager tends to be. Sometimes he didn’t feel like doing computer stuff and we’d hang out outside and sometimes he’d be at dinner and sometimes he wasn’t home at all, and I’d be standing out there, scared to press the doorbell again, listening to an angry dog barking inside and wondering what else I’d do with that summer day if Alex didn’t open the door. This was my childhood, computers and odd friendships and summers with long forgotten days I can sometimes pull out from my mental archives if I concentrate a bit or see a word or a font of an Atari.

Alex was my friend. He didn’t have to be at all, but he was. Thanks, Alex.

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To ensure that things would run smoothly at the demoparty that I was hosting, I worked for no short time on a Partymeister server. Partymeister is basically demoparty maintenance software which allows for ease of voting, tabulation, messaging between attendees and a dozen other functions. It’s really cool, but required a lot of careful, quiet setup and planning. Therefore, I set a server up locally and spent a couple weeks customizing it.

I packed up the server along with a bunch of other junk into a rented van and drove single-handledly from Boston to Cleveland in a single 10-hour trip. I do not recommend this course of action to anyone. Bring a friend. By the end of the trip, your road has turned into a cotton-candy path with unicorns on either side trumpeting “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”.

After arriving and napping a tad, I booted up my laptop and instinctually checked a couple of my websites at home. Some worked, some timed out. Weird. I checked further; all the timed-out ones were on the same machine. Weeeird. And that machine was right next to the one I had unplugged downstairs and brought with me….

Slowly I turned, inch by inch, step by step…

Yes, that’s right, I’d taken the machine that hosted cow.net, bbsdocumentary.com, getlamp.com and a host of other sites offline, loaded it into a van, and driven west with it for 675 miles.

It was now in a hotel room with me instead of in my basement.. and the machine with those weeks of work was up, just fine, running in that same basement!

This is an acid test for how one approaches their websites, data, and machines. Could I recover, even though I’d removed a vital part of my setup, especially the one that makes money?

As it turned out, I was able to recover by taking the now-unused IP address of the server in my hotel room and then attaching it to the server that was still running, and then transferring my website data from the “staging server” that isn’t directly on the internet onto this now-more-loaded server. At this point, I made another delightful discovery: I kind of set up the webserver wrong and had “Virtual Name Hosting” done in a way that never should have worked but which sort of did. This required more editing of the configuration files. When I finished that, I got distracted (I was at the conference, after all) and forgot to put it back up. So all in all, I gave all my websites a pretty good punch in the gut.

I was able to recover most of the Partymeister settings as well, although that was relatively painful.

I mention all this mostly to make note of the fact that I was able to recover relatively quickly, even with the complete and total physical removal of a server and myself from the basement with my machines. This was because of my approach of keeping data in several places, and being able to transfer them between each other. I know enough about the webservers and the operating system to “fake up” a second machine on top of another, to get it all working.

But isn’t it interesting that we’re still at a point where a person still can so easily cause catostrophic failure to their own sites, their own web services. If I’d been hosting everything major with a hosting provider, this might never have happened.

But to do that removes, utterly and finally, that feeling of strength and self-sufficiency that I feel when I know I am 100 feet from my websites most of the day. This is a strong, powerful feeling and it makes me feel good about myself. But the apparent price I pay is that being in a rushed mode or doing something new and unusual could doom it all for days on end.

Every once in a while, another item, another aspect of things I used to do by myself so long ago are being turned into pennies-per-day services I could go to a hundred places to have done properly. It’s obvious where the trend is going. And often, they do it better, unless you consider being able to hear your disk drives whirring to be a vital part of the administration process.

If you do, my advice is to go record the sound now, and leave it as a running audio loop in your mp3 player while you work.

Based on this whole unexpected, stupid outage, I’ll probably host that audio loop somewhere else.

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There was an article that came out recently, describing in some level of depth and accuracy the story of the l0pht, a “hacker collective” that thrived from the early 1990s through to a purchase/merger by a rebranded security company called @stake, which for all intents and purposes killed it.

This is a somewhat jarring article to read, because I know pretty much everyone mentioned in it. Many are friends. Some are distant friends, some very close indeed. The BBS I founded, The Works, makes a mention (thanks, Weld) and the amount of facts or descriptions that are correct is quite amazing, considering the natural distrust of the press many members might have at this point of time.

I was on the outskirts of this beautiful and terrifying thing, this conflagration of technical types, weird-fits, buddies and folks who were all together the Boston-area “Scene” of the 1990s. From it came a rebirth of the Cult of the Dead Cow, the creation of the l0pht, the wide press, the cool BBSes… many many aspects of my past that have made me feel like my life hasn’t been wasted.

There’s been talk back and forth of writing a book. I’m a little worried at this point, with all my other stuff going on, that I may never be able to sit down and help with such a project. It would be quite neat. There’s the slight problem that some people within this social group would literally jump the table and strangle other people if put into the same room, so no group photos will be happening soon without a photoshop “crop” tool. The other problem is that there is this huge set of myths and stories that accompany everything, and many folks involved are of two sides about letting hair down. Then, eventually, you get to the point that nobody remembers anything at all, without it all having some sort of translucent silk of nostalgia and unruffled feathers on it. It’s a classic issue of historical narrative: the feelings are real, the hurt was real, the triumphs are real, and the protagonists/antagonists have a disinterest in dropping it all onto the page.

This entry is all too impulsive for me to sit here and write some massive narrative/historical perspective of my time on the outskirts of the Boston BBS scene and these many groups; but I suppose I can at least drop one bit of information that is relevant to the article.

The purchase of the L0pht by @stake was the worst thing ever.

I don’t mean that it was bad that members of the l0pht “grew up” and went professionally into a field they’d been working in as amateurs and making waves therein. And I certainly don’t mean it was bad they chose to do so under a corporate umbrella, working for a company seeking to enhance its brand by re-inventing itself as @stake (it had years of existence under some dreary, non-sexy name beforehand, which is very difficult to track down). All of this made sense for some of the folks, and their continued existence (and relevance!) in the security industry proves that it was a good move for them.

I mean that, in hindsight, the proper and right thing that would have saved an awful lot of headaches and despair (although not removed it completely) was to either to close down “the l0pht” officially as a group and have various members go off to join the professional world, or to have left “the l0pht” to the people who were not choosing to go into it professionally, so the collective could continue in some fashion, perhaps better or worse, not unlike the Chaos Computer Club which is not only still active but actually has founders who are dying of old age.

Instead, what happened was that this outsider organization, and a nexus of friendships and interrelations, was turned into a brand-name, a product for sale, a widget that could be plugged into the waiting socket of this heartless @stake company (now owned by Symantec, making it exponentially more heartless). This was because of money, obviously. The company wanted the cachet of “hackers” working for their good, thinking this would give them street cred in an industry. Unfortunately, that industry was very little interested in street cred, and in fact generally is not interested in disruption of any sort. So this backfired. And choices were made.

Because this was “the l0pht” in there, and not just “former members of the l0pht”, I got to hear of a lot of heartbreak, with friends betraying other friends over (normal) corporate choices, plus to hear as it became quite obvious that only the name of the l0pht was wanted, nothing else. This was a disaster.

The thing is… this had all happened before with the situation of the Legion of Doom becoming “Comsec Data Security”, a rebranded professional company intended to use the skills built up as non-professionals to work as professionals. It didn’t go spectacularly well, but as far as I know it didn’t result in life-long friends never speaking to each other again. Sure, the outside observers yelled “Sellout”, but that happens whenever money enters an equation.

But I still contend it was a lack of drawing the curtain on a “l0pht era” and trying to usher it into an “@stake era” that was by far the worst mistake made for everyone. It wasn’t evil, it wasn’t someone being a jerk; it was just a poor decision in hindsight, and if people could learn one thing from the whole deal, I hope it would be that if you bring a lot of money into your friendships, they are, more likely than not, never going to be friendships again.

That’s all I have until I help write a book or something. Long live the Lady of the Vax.

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As I’m preparing to head out to the Blockparty @ Notacon event, I try to clear out my e-mail, because I’ll be away from my home office and working on stuff on a stunted pace. It’s always a kind of grab-bag situation, finally giving an e-mail that’s been tenaciously sitting around waiting for me to act on it, sometimes for months. In this case, I’m caught up to March, so things aren’t too bad.

One nice one that came in recently was a bloke from Australia who sent along a collection of diskmags. He was wondering where I’d find a place for them, and as it turns out, I already have a place with disk magazines in artscene.textfiles.com, in a directory called emags. Notably, it was a crappily-put-together, completely ignored directory… but it was a directory!

I’ve since run a few of my scripts in it, and while it’s still not in great shape, it’s in a lot better shape than it was. The year that this Australian diskmag came out, 1996, looks good and is properly formatted and described. Others not so much.

The zine in question, SHADE, is mostly a textfile zine that happened to come wrapped inside a executable. It was described to me as an “Anarchist” zine, which means that each “issue” was a single textfile talking about how to commit destruction in some fashion, headed up with a massive disclaimer that you should never do anything with it and don’t come after the author and so on. The first few files are written or spelled well at all, but the later ones have nice ANSI color and proper layout; I can’t verify from here if they’re lifted from other sources or all written “in-house”, as it were. I was told there were 19 issues completed, with a 20th one on the drawing board but never quite put out. The lifespan is basically the end of 1995 to the beginning of 1997, not a bad run.

With it just being an “executable text file”, an enterprising young lad could probably extract the ANSI text inside and not really ruin/mess up the full experience of SHADE. I like to maintain the ZIP files, though, because they have both dates of creation (important in determining history, though not 100% dependable) and ancillary files added by various BBSes over the years to say “Hey, now that you’re done reading that, come check out our board!!!”. Here’s the one included with SHADE Issue #2:

This file was uploaded on the 12-09-1996 at 11:27pm to node 1 of...
________________   ___________     ___ _____________/\_______
À  \_   ____  ¬/ ¬/___\_  ____/ ¬\  _/ ¬/\_   ____  ¬/__¬\    ¬/    ¿
::     /    \_/   _   /   __/__   \/   /  \_ /    \_/ _/  \__ /_  :::
:::   ____   /    /  /____    /        \_  /____   /__\    /    \_ ::
::::     \  /____/  /     \  /    \/__  / /    \  /    \  / ___  / ::
::::::..  \/   /___/       \/   __/     \/      \/      \/   \  / :::
::::::           .:. Chemical Genocide Australia .:.          \/ ::::
::::: _________________________________________ _______________ :::::
::::  ¬ _____\_ ¬_________ ¬\_  _¬\_   ____  ¬/ \_  _¬\_  ____   ::::
:: _/  /   \_/   __/__   /   /  /  /  /    \_/ \_/  / /   __/__    ::
.   _____   /____    /__/   /_____/  ____   /\  /____/____   ¬/     .
! «¸«¸«¸\  /«¸«¸«\  /¸«/   /¸«¸«¸«¸«¸«¸«\  /¸/ /«¸«¸«¸«¸«¸\«¸«¸«¸«¸«¸
¬        \/       \/  /___/              \/  \/            \/
))\   __/\__                                       __/\__   /((  !
! (O o)  \ oO /     ¸ running ami/x ¸ oblivion/2 ¸    \ Oo /  (O o)
( ^ )  / \/ \              zyz's ¸ pulse            / \/ \  ( ^ ) .
. ~^~^~~ ~~\/~~     messiah.kickass.obv/2.setup.dude  ~~\/~~ ~~^~^~
.               running on an p100 with 32 gig of spam ¬            .
­           ¸ 25oo ounces on-line ¸ flower sniff'n power ¸          ­
¦ .            running at 288oo hydroponically grown bps          . ¦
?     reality check network dist site - shade & nfc member board    ?
\/

I could probably draw an entire discussion out of the combination of drug references, braggable system information, modem speed, pirate groups (NFC and SHADE) and so on. In trying to get some credentials and name for their board, these sysops unwittingly left a little postcard to the future, and 11 years on we get to peek in.

The problem with these executables, of course, is that very attribute: they’re programs. And programs start to lose relevance a lot quicker than text, and as the world becomes more and more paranoid about executing transferred programs, they become treated like contraband a little more as well.

I’m delighted to play a little part in bringing this stuff back; there’s so much still floating out there on hard drives and floppies, and once in a while a little time machine shows up.

This whole new collection of SHADE, some group of kids’ hard work from a decade ago, was a mere 700k e-mail attachment, transferred to me in seconds from across the world. Who knows what tomorrow’s e-mail will bring.

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Yesterday’s mention of Super Paper Mario reminds me of a little low-rumbling theme I’ve encountered in the past decade or so, with regards to people hearing I do things like buy the Nintendo Wii or dump cash into an iPod or fuck around with Twitter and the like. Apparently it can be jarring to think of a “historian” jumping into the melee of the newest of the new, the Current Hotness, the Bleeding Edge, or the latest bits of fashion that spray through the internet and popular culture. Not jarring to everyone, mind you, or even a lot of people, but a vocal tad.

It actually works in two vectors: people who are surprised I like “new” stuff when they normally hear of my speeches on “old” stuff, and people who really dig “old” stuff who consider me a touchstone for disparaging “new” stuff, unaware that the “new” stuff is three feet away from me in my office.

I don’t dislike new things. In fact, I really like them a lot. I only have issues or raise complaints when new things act like they’re the first of their kind, or when I see people with agendas, either money or power, totally ignore what has come before in an attempt to sway opinions to a recent controversy. This isn’t to say that everything old did it right… But by acting like nothing ever happened before, you throw out a chance to learn why something was done the way it was, and later obsoleted or brought back into use under a new name.

I don’t have a desire to “go back” to a previous time, to eschew the way things currently are and get into some sort of time machine. That said, I appreciate good solid retroactive design – if I see someone take a 1970s design and work it into a modern piece of software, I get warm and happy. it just doesn’t mean I wish I was 5 again.

I have had to sit in a lot of locations and events, in person, and have the very nice, very cool person explain to me how every single thing in the modern world is fucked up, and things should be as it used to be. I am nodded to because I am of the brotherhood of people who acknowledge there even was a past. It wouldn’t help the conversation for me to praise the present and its many superior aspects to the past being aggrandized in retrospect. I now do stuff in 5 minutes that used to be a week-long drudgery, leaving me to do more stuff in a single day than I ever could have dreamed I’d find time for in a teenage summer.

I appreciate the compliment by being talked to this way; I just don’t think we’re always on the same page about where this history stands in context and relevance to one’s daily routine.

On the flip side, I have gotten my retrotechnology interests used against me in debate. I recall one particularly juicy episode where I insulted a weblogging librarian about her self-aggrandization of spreading the breaking news about the existence of RSS and weblogs, and got back a faceful of “go back to your textfiles”. Take that, Jason! (Luckily, the textfiles are absorbent and have dried my tears.) Along that line of thinking, I do see the occasional reference to the information on textfiles.com being “old” and “out of date”; charges I will happily cop to! The articles on crossbar telephone switching systems are struggling quite mightily to stay relevant.

But the core fact is this: when I collected a lot of my stuff, especially the information, it was brand new, right off the keyboard of a kid down the block or across the state. I was keeping on top of the latest working BBS numbers, the coolest software I could get my hands on, and the advertising for the hottest new computer products. I was right there in the body press of the best and the newest; I just couldn’t afford a lot of it, and had to settle for playing with it down at the local store. The difference is that I kept the stuff, just like I keep a lot of modern stuff, and I held onto it until people missed it. Or had forgotten about it. Or even had the good sense to be born since it happened. History is someone else’s present, after all.

But I’m still not switching to Vista.

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I’ve been playing Super Paper Mario for the Wii since it came out, and I finally “Solved” it, that is, I got to the part where it shows you the credits after telling you how everything ended.

I choose games I’m going to get really involved in carefully these days; lack of time and all that. What I look for is a sense that a game has been crafted in some fashion, and not just shoved out the door on a nasty out-of-thin-air selling schedule. Games that are created over the course of years are rare these days, with the obvious exception of games that are being worked on as a hobby. And there’s these sets of folks within Nintendo creating games to this level, and I buy them, and I am very happy.

I enjoyed Paper Mario, Super Mario Sunshine, Thousand Year Door, Zelda: Wind Waker and Zelda: Twilight Princess for this reason; all of them had the sense of being self-enclosed worlds, slavishly worked on by people who were all geared towards making the game better. This is especially the case in the 3-D games, where you walk around and realize these “level maps” feel like actual places; I recall a couple times playing Twilight Princess, far involved in the plot and gathering of the whatsis and the rebellion of the whosis, and I would stop to admire the view.

So much cheating and hackery has had to be done in the past to make a game feel like it’s bigger than it is, that I still get surprised when I find cases within the game that it’s not a cheat. The idea of “well, if I do this crazy thing and pile on this other crazy thing, I’ll end up in this location it never expected me to go” and then you do it and there’s an object up there, basically saying “so, what took you so long”… I wonder if newer generations of game players feel that. I marveled once at an airport, watching two seven-year-olds screwing with a touch-screen tourist kiosk, and realized they had never known a time you couldn’t walk up to some TVs and touch them and have it do something. The idea is neither weird nor miraculous nor even unusual to them. Maybe the kids who come up simply expect a decent game to have extended out to hundreds of locations and have nearly-fully-articulated world interaction within those locations? if so, keep yelling at the game companies; I’m benefiting.

I think the best indication to me about these high-ticket Zelda/Mario games is how the development cycles sometimes outlast the platform. At some point, this was going to be a pure GameCube game, and then they strapped on the Wii controls. For me, they work perfectly fine and seem to have always been designed for it; I especially like the pointing feature where I take the controller and aim it at the screen, turning it into a cursor that can give me more information on any of the objects in sight. The swap from 2D to 3D and back was also wonderful. All in all, a good game.

Most notably, this is actually something like the fourth game in a “series”, consisting of Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, and now Super Paper Mario: Keep Buying Paper Mario. The structure used to be more like a turn-based role-playing game, which wasn’t entirely my favorite but it was a lot of fun. Now they ripped all that “turn-based” part out, making it, essentially, the largest game of Super Mario in the entirety of history. With only the slightest pretension of its RPG roots, now the game’s basically a really involved video game, and hooray for that. Hardcore Gamers will probably hate it, but hardcore anything hates everything.

One other thought. I remember when I was working at Psygnosis, just before the Playstation started to hit, we had one in the office. But not just any one; we had a development playstation, which was blue and had, critically, 8 megabytes of memory, just like the Playstation was going to have. But since Sony sucks, they cheaped out at the last possible moment and made it 2 megabytes. A bunch of games were stuck in the middle, where they had to completely rejigger these great-looking games to fit in 1/4th the memory. One of these was the spectacular Lomax, which had multiple backgrounds scrolling by as you jumped around on different platforms. I’d show it to people and they’d go “wow”. After the Great Cheaping Out, pretty much all those scrolling backgrounds had to go. All that work, gone. Meanwhile, in Paper Mario, I see visual effects that probably eat 2 megabytes just warming up. And the multiple scrolling backgrounds that shot the old game Shadow of the Beast to the top of the charts are all over the place here, adding that flair and style just because they can.

When I found Super Mario in a crappy arcade in Carmel, NY next to a scary pet store and down the strip mall from a horrible record store, I never could have imagined that 20 years later I’d be playing variations with almost all the same game mechanics. And way better graphics. In my house. Waving a white wand.

OK, I knew some sort of white wand was going to be involved.

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Roughly three months ago I joined a gym and mentioned on here that I was doing so. I also explained my motivations for doing it and what I hoped to achieve.

I just wanted to mention, I’m still doing it! 3-4 times a week, I make myself miserable for an hour or two on the treadmill and a variety of machines that only lack wheels to be capable of taking over the city. The combination of a pill regimen and the functional quality of mirrors have kept me at it.

I haven’t turned into a sexy little pineapple from this, but I at least feel like I’m undoing some significant damage from decades of avoiding exercise of any sort. For example, this week a trainer and I launched an expedition to find my biceps! I have some! Sort of!

The gym has maintained its nice quality, not turning into a torture chamber or dull sweatbox, handing me cheap excuses to avoid showing up. It’s still expensive, of course, and that too has been a motivating factor (skip a session and I’ve thrown away $12!) but mostly, it’s just feeling ever-so-better.

Now, after six months, I definitely want to see Sexy Little Pineapple or I’m busting heads.

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It has been six months since I’ve watched television.

This is not to say I don’t occasionally watch a downloaded episode of some series I’m interested in, or watching movies, or avoiding anything with a three-letter acronym attached to it. What I mean is that the act of sitting in front of my TV taking in stuff hasn’t happened for half a year. I have a TiVO and a satellite connection, and I can see the little guy showing the red light recording and providing me with little bundles of joy, but I just haven’t turned the bastard on.

There was a time when I was watching TV for half my waking hours, taking in every bit of trivia, entertainment, news story, or commercial I could find. I watched everything, because I was both fascinated at how stuff was made, as well as all the cultural touchstones going by in the talk shows, kids’ shows, music videos. As far as my style of saying utterly random things in my writing goes, let’s just credit television.

I wasn’t lonely, either. I liked watching TV, going between channels, enjoying everything that went by. I didn’t feel at the time that I was missing out on anything, and looking back I suppose I could formulate out of the air a thousand things I could have done instead (“start learning low-level programming and how to solder, immediately”) but I’m pretty happy with how things balanced out.

Now it just doesn’t happen.

I suppose I could be pithy and claim this is because of a reducing quality in television, but that’s not true. I see (or, I saw) lots of shows that I really enjoyed, especially the rash of shows that were about people making something but hating each other. I love that stuff, even if it’s fakery piled on top of other fakery.

No, I suspect it’s because I’m making stuff.

Obviously, the documentaries are the main thing I’m making, but I also make music, and write (like this weblog) and do a bunch of similar creating. And when I’m making “stuff”, I guess the need to sit around looking at other people’s “stuff” becomes much less pressing. Not to say this translates completely to “people who accomplish stuff don’t watch TV”, but more a case of “people who are really busy sometimes choose the previously-most-time-consuming activities and shitcan it, suprising people they used to do it with”. Since I don’t have anyone I was really watching TV with, the need for intervention isn’t there.

Man, that’d be a great intervention. “Sit down, goddamnit, and watch Monster Garage. We’re NOT going to lose you. Not this time, not while we all love you!” Maybe I’d get free snacks.

Anyway, I have a list of television shows I’m supposed to be watching at some point that probably constitutes a lost month in my future. My ass can hardly wait.

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Buried in the middle of the insane interview I did with Grandmaster Ratte’ of the Cult of the Dead Cow in his bathtub, a time when I was laughing so hard I had to go out and collapse in the hallway of his apartment so as not to ruin the take, is a rather insightful phrase.

Talking about pirating, Ratte’ made a mention of the “Scent of a Ware”. You can hear his phrasing of it in an mp3 I made a while ago. His bathtub “interview” lasted 20 minutes or so, of which I think I used 2 as an easter egg on the Documentary DVD because it totally broke any mood built up around it.

But you know, he was right?

There really was this sense of hunting, tracking down, scoping around for whatever new software was out there. The rules have changed in the modern era but the idea is the same: you and others want something, some people would prefer you not have it, and the conflict within yields both pain and pleasure for all involved. It was a slower process in the 1980s, involving hours or days or even weeks, but all software acquisition achieves that moment when your downloaded file was booting up, and you’re waiting to see whether you had achieved total victory or complete failure.

The chance for serendipity was great here, as well as people pulling some memorable pranks. But that feeling, the idea of booting something up and staring into the screen and hoping it was what you wanted and praying it won’t be something you’d never want in a million years; that’s a strong feeling. A lot of description of experiences are about the utility and usability of a program. There’s something to be said for those heady moments before the program actually runs.

Maybe I’ll find a way to recreate it artistically, or in writing, or something of the like. Another odd, hard-to-capture feeling tucked away for a rainy day…

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