ASCII by Jason Scott

I’ll write a separate summary of Shmoocon shortly, but I wanted to highlight a most intriguing idea which the fellows from the Hacker Foundation are floating and putting together. The idea is simple enough: Hackers on a Plane. Here’s the pitch.

Basically, there’s the DEFCON convention, coming this summer to Las Vegas, and shortly afterward there’s another edition of the world-famous Chaos Communications Camp, which a 5-day camping expedition in Germany that combines hacking, engineering, and a whole host of amazing activities.

So, let’s say you want to attend both of these events, and you want to do it in a style so slick your grandkids will be talking about how cool you were back then. Well, the Hacker Foundation has done it with Hackers on a Plane.

First, let’s get this number out of the way: $5,000. That’s the cost. Don’t run away. Here’s what that gets you:

• Attendance through a special distinguishing badge at both DEFCON and the Chaos Communications Camp 2007. You’re a welcome guest at both events with a badge that almost nobody else has.
• After DEFCON is over, you’re picked up that Monday at McCarran airport in a specially-chartered Maxjet.
• A Maxjet is not just some run-of-the-mill pissant Jet; these things are designed to be the ultimate in comfort. Every seat is a business class seat, with 160 degree recline and a 2-2-2 configuration; there are no middle seats, only aisle seats.
• The normal carry limits are out the window; you will be able to haul a lot more stuff than you ever could across international lines. No drugs and weapons, of course, but the limits are a lot different than you’ve ever experienced before.
• On the flight, meals and alcohol will be served, all completely included. (No $3 beers, etc.)
• Previews of presentations to be given at CCC will take place on one end of the plane.
• This is a nonstop flight directly between Las Vegas and the location of CCC 2007. You will walk off the plane and “be there”.
• 50% of your $5k is a tax-deductable (!) donation to the Hacker Foundation, a registered non-profit that provides financial and advising assistance to groups working to spread knowledge and seed hacker spaces (labs) throughout the US, attempting to duplicate the situation of such spaces in Europe.
• At the end of your time at Chaos Communications Camp, you will be flown, business class, from the location in Germany back to wherever you’re located in the US.

So basically, we’re talking a full-fledged travel package (minus hotel in Defcon) that will give you a unique way to enjoy both of these events in high-life style. These guys have worked hard to come up with a fundraiser that will be long remembered. It’s a killer.

However, they need people to sign up, not just folks who think it’s a good idea. Spread the word, please. If you have a company that expenses trips, or you have extra cash and want to make a charitable donation while living like a king, here’s the big chance. Contact the Hacker Foundation for more details about it.

I’m always happy when people think out of the box like this. I know they only have a couple weeks to pull together deposits. If you were thinking of attending both events, this is the way to do it.

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Under the “humble beginnings” department, I present to you my first film; “Headrush”. Created in 1986, this was the final project for a film class I took in Sophomore year at Horace Greeley High School. It was shot on 8mm film, and required the soundtrack to be played on a record player timed to the beginning. I knew this was a tall order, so the soundtrack is a (copyrighted) piece of music that had a lot of notes and beat changes, ensuring that it would be more likely to synchronize to whatever was going on.

I described the film as “What it would be like to go through Horace Greeley High School after you hit your head.” Some kids were impressed. Some were not. My film teacher hated it, and as I recall, she gave me a C. (I still have the graded paper around here, and maybe I’ll dig it up one of these days.)

There’s only a dozen physical cuts in the film. The rest of them are done “in-camera”, with me basically painting scenes using the available light and background. This was, I contend to this day, a way to get around the limitations of the medium; cutting was hard work and the effect was jittery bounces in the film. I employed stop-motion shots in some locations, have two subliminal messages (one easy to spot, one harder to spot), and feature a cast of dozens, including my friends and my little brother. At one point you see a shadow running along grass. That’s my “director’s cameo”.

I apologize in advance that I only have it lying around in DiVX Format. The file is here and is 32 megabytes:

“Headrush”, by Jason Scott (1986)

I had a lot of fun making that thing; it was shot in about a day. If you know the place, it almost functions as a home movie. A very weird, surreal, screwed-up home movie.

I don’t think it deserved a C.

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Today, I leave for Shmoocon, a security and hacking convention held in Washington, DC and brokered by the Shmoo Group, members of which I’ve become good buddies with. I’m co-presenting with a handful of people on Sunday, a talk in which we cover aspects of the One Laptop Per Child project. This project is basically an altrustic experiment to make a low-cost laptop (originally quoted at $100 but currently a bit less than $200) that can be sent out by the thousands to countries in “need” of technology, enabling generations of schoolchildren to have access to computers they’d never otherwise touch.

I’m doing a short historical perspective before the real fun starts; a backward-looking monologist feathering the crowd with related tangents to the OLPC experiment. When I’m not doing that, I’ll be doing what I love doing: socializing, attending the occasional talk, enjoying a little time around the nation’s capital.

If this is a strange jibe with the whole “I’m shooting a music video” from yesterday, the performer isn’t available this weekend and this event has been scheduled with me for months, so there you go.

Shmoocon sold out, literally within hours, so there’s no easy way to get in there, but the hotel it’s being held in has a huge (almost obscene) lobby and lots of places to hang out that aren’t the actual shmoocon location. I’ll be around all weekend, so stop by, capitol residents!

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So, next week I’m shooting a music video. Not too many details to give right now about the content itself, but I did want to touch a little bit on things involved in making one, because it might be of use to people.

Music Videos are basically short films that accompany music; they can range from being exacting performances of the lyrics of a song, or they can be entirely unrealted creations that are essentially using the music as background. A spectrum of quality arises as well, when you compare them to each other.

Thanks to our achieving the era of the Microtheft, here’s a few music videos that come to mind:

• Cylob – Rewind, in which one thing happens, but it’s a really neat thing happening.
• Carpark North – Human, in which you see a lot of strange things happen.
• Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar in which one strange thing is happening, even thought it might take a little while to figure it out.
• Chemical Brothers – Let Forever Be, in which a strange thing keeps happening so much that you eventually completely lose track of it.
• Flock of Seagulls – I Ran, in which… come on, dude, it’s FLOCK OF SEAGULLS!

Talk has gone back and forth about doing this music video for a while, but now it’s gotten the green light. I have 9 days to shoot the principal photography, after which the performer will be unavailable. I have had a demo version of the song for some time, and now I have the finished song. I am funding this video. I will also be staffing it, and co-creating it with the performer.

I bring this out into the open to just discuss the thinking process; most critically, as a person putting together a project, I find it best to design something that is within your means. A more incredible video that you ultimately can’t pull off is even worse than not making one in the first place. You end up wasting everyone’s time, and money, and have nothing to show for it.

Therefore, I am working within my means to ensure the resulting product will be good, even if a certain number of things go wrong during production. I expect to shoot something like an hour to two hours of footage, which will be cut down to 5 minutes. I expect a week or two of post-production beyond editing. I also expect to do at least two shoots without the performer, what’s commonly called “second unit” footage, although I will be playing the part of the second unit as well.

Currently, I’m planning for three sets, one of which will be in my attic, and two in my basement. There will be a sequence shot outside in a “run and gun” fashion, and one inside a college on a similar “run and gun” fashion. I will visit the college campus before shooting commences and take some snapshots to ensure what’s in my head fits with what is there; the same for the sets in my home.

The biggest budgetary concern has already been bought; my HD camera I’m shooting my documentary with. I’ve already got lights, already got props, already have a bunch of other materials one would normally have to rent or buy.

Next, I contact a couple people I’ve chatted with over the years to see if they want to be entirely unpaid crew members. I start yanking stuff out of the “sets” to build them up as I expect them to look. And I wonder, as I go to do this, what could possibly go wrong, and what I can do to prevent it.

Stay tuned.

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If you’re stumbling onto this weblog entry without any other context, be aware of two things: first, I wrote a very large love letter to Creative Commons a ways ago, and I took a 4-year project/documentary and released it under one of the most liberal Creative Commons licenses available: Attribution-Sharealike 2.0. So I put my money where my mouth is.

This is speculative, anecdotal, and unsolicited. So you know it’ll be good.

I’m a big fan of Creative Commons the variation on US Copyright Law that allows for a greater range of freedoms to created works. If you’ve not heard of it before, the website they have gives a pretty good overview of the thinking.

Creative Commons is an interesting side hack. Instead of just trying to fight the various embarrassingly overarching copyright laws and have creators feel they only have the choice of releasing things to the public domain or locking everything down forever, a group of lawyers and activists created alternate copyrights. These sets of copyrights range from essentially releasing to the public domain all the way up to pretty restrictive lock-downs, although lacking some of the more egregious aspects of “standard” US copyright law.

It’s essentially a “fork” off of the copyright tree, just like people do with software, where someone comes along and goes “I’m going to concentrate on security” or “I really hate the asshole who runs that project” and off they go. Occasionally they focus on security over usability and sometimes they’re an even bigger asshole than Original Asshole, but still, this is in many ways a sensical response to madness or poor choices: make new madness and new poor choices. The question, really, is if the new madness and new poor choices attract enough of audience to be a going concern. Creative Commons has, in fact, done that.

Not only has it done that, it’s really done that. It’s almost a matter of incredulity that Creative Commons is only 6 years old. There are, at this point, literally millions of works available under Creative Commons. Photos, songs, movies, writings, weblog entries… if you know where to look, you could spend the rest of your life traipsing through media under Creative Commons License and never run out.

But as someone who launched into a major project that was ultimately under Creative Commons, I spent a lot of time actually going through the process of using it, of reading it, of dealing with people I’d never met and will never meet and using their stuff, and I had some conclusions about it.

But first, a little bit on contracts.

Buying a house is a harrowing experience, especially if you’re in an inflated real estate market. You’re dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars into something, and it’s probably the biggest purchase you’ll ever be making. It’s also one where a lot of hands get into the pie: agents, lawyers, banks, and so on. For my own case, there was my lawyer, the sellers’ lawyer, the real estate broker, the real estate broker’s boss, and a representative of the bank all in the same little room a half-mile from my future home. There were somewhere between six million and fourteen million (I’ve forgotten exactly how many) places I had to initial, sign, place my ass-print, etc. If you’ve ever rented a car, they make you initial a bunch of stuff as well as signing it. Well, it’s a lot worse with buying a house.

So I’m sitting there reading the contracts one more time, and I saw this one clause buried in the middle of the mortgage contract, which read, basically:

“You hereby grant The Bank limited power of attorney to effect minor changes in the contract for the purposes of correction, typographical errors, etc.”

It took about a paragraph to do this, but that’s basically what it said.

“Hello, what the good goddamn is this?” I politely said. “I’m not going to sign that.”

This broke everything. The seller’s lawyer was nonplussed, my lawyer was pooh-poohing it, the bank guy was shifting in his seat. Everyone indicated, in their own way, that this was no big deal, just sign it. Well guess what. No.

The ceremony and wonder of a bunch of people in a room and a big stack of papers I was signing was not going to sway me to spontaneously look at something that I considered horseshit and sign my name to, just because there was some sort of reward, i.e. a house, at the end of it. I was renting an apartment and if need be, I was going to buy another house, elsewhere, where I wasn’t granting limited power of attorney. The bank guy had to call back to the home office to get permission to strike this, while my own lawyer person was explaining this was no major issue. “If they have to make a minor change, they can call my cell phone,” I said. “And THAT’s no big deal.”

And you know what? They struck it. If they decide they need to make a “minor change” (or, more accurately, the bank of the sub-bank of the hedge fund of the clearinghouse that no doubt bought my mortgage needed to make a “minor change”) then I’d get a little ringy-dingy.

It’s been 4 years. No ringy-dingy.

There’s a moral or two in there. I’m sure for some people it’s Jason Scott is an obtuse dickweed and you should never do business with him, but I hope that for the majority of the folks reading it’s Jason Scott honors contracts and he can only do that if he understands the contracts he’s signing.

And my thesis is that an awful lot of people are signing Creative Commons deeds without understanding a whole lot about them.

So, back to Creative Commons.

Creative Commons, like I said, lubricates the process of not wanting to put draconian copyright law on your works but also not wanting to release things into the public domain. It does this because a lot of law students and lawyers worked together and crafted an architecture out of contract law to provide you a ready-made, EZ-bake deed. They’ve been very meticulous about it, too. Not only do you get the actual contracts out there, but you also get tools to publish your works and the equivalent of sitting down with a team of lawyers to give you the chance to indicate what you want. Of course, the questions are rather simplistic, like “Allow modifications of your work?”, but all of those have little clicky popups that will elaborate, if you so choose.

And make no mistake, Creative Commons tries very, very, very hard to make sure everyone understands what they’re getting into. The “Think About It” page is nothing less than a waiting room where you’re meant to mull over things carefully, understand the ramifications of this stuff, realize what you’re ultimately doing. Creative Commons is not evil.

I intended to sprinkle my documentary series with Creative Commons-licensed works. After the documentary was finished, I intended to do a thousands-of-units production run of it. And when you’re about to dump $30,000 into duplicating a bunch of plastic and cardboard that would be relatively expensive to re-duplicate, you want to make sure that every last thing on there, that you can possibly double-check, has been double-checked. That goes for quality of image, that goes for sound clarity, and that goes for your rights to duplicate and sell those things. Granted, it is basically impossible to create any work of any length and not technically infringe on something, somewhere, somehow. But you can certainly do your best to not close your eyes and backflip into a pool, hoping some other guy did that whole “filling with water” part.

So when I found music to use from something called the OPSound Pool, a website whose rule is that you have to license your music under the Attribution-Sharealike License (one of the most liberal), I went and researched every band to verify they were the ones who put the music up. I would also, in most cases, contact the artists if I could find them.

What I encountered a couple of times is that artists would be on Opsound or other locations, and while they were “licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Sharelike”, every vibe I got from their sites was that they were doing no such thing, in their minds.

I’d see things like “I’m licensed CC-BY-SA” and within the same paragraph, I’d see “You may not sell copies of this work.” Well, that’s wrong. You can sell copies of the work if you want to. You can remix it into a rap song about abusing women. You can turn it into a ringtone and sell it at a buck apiece. You can take a movie under CC-BY-SA and then play it forever in a movie house and charge $10 a head to see it and pocket all the cash!

The BBS Documentary was licensed CC-BY-SA 2.0. Here’s some of the things that people have done that I know of, all of them implicitly allowed by that license:

• Translated the whole thing into Chinese and subtitled it.
• Uploaded it to Google Video.
• Uploaded it to YouTube, in pieces.
• Shown it to students of a college for a networking class.
• Shown it to high school students for the hell of it.
• Given it to a library.
• Made it part of the selection at a video store.
• Bittorrented individual episodes, and complete DVD-ROM .ISOs.
• Uploaded the whole 18gb of data to Usenet.
• Burned dozens of copies for your friends.
• Kept a copy of the whole thing on your central server so anyone at the house could watch it.
• Taken an episode that has you in it and left it on your website so people could get your story.

In most of these cases, I don’t see a dime even though more and more people are seeing it than bought it. In some cases, hundreds of people are; thepiratebay showed thousands of downloads of the episodes when it was still a hot ware. Do I feel cheated, used, abused?

NO. THIS WAS IN MY CONTRACT. AND I READ MY CONTRACT.

One case that sticks out in my mind was this guy who had his stuff up on Opsound, totally claiming the license of CC-BY-SA, but also including “you may not make any changes to the work” in the description of his band. His music was pretty good, and I was considering using it, but that dissonant line got my attention. So I wrote him, and said “So are you licensing it Creative Commons, or is it copyrighted? Because you can’t have both those lines in there.” His response, somewhat crankily, was “No, it’s definitely CC licensed, but you can’t change it.” My ill-advised response was “Well, yes, yes I absolutely can.” Things went downhill from there.

There’s an interesting tangent to the story; of course, sensing danger, I didn’t use any of his music. I figured “Obviously, this person signed up for Opsound to get more distribution, but he didn’t want or understand what all those crazy rules meant.” I went on with my production, about 9 months passed, and I suddenly had 5,000 copies of the BBS Documentary in my basement. Wonderful! I was then giving away dozens of copies: people who’d given me cash, people who pre-paid, musicians and others who had provided me stuff either directly or through a CC license.

Somewhere in there, I had the guy’s name in my “musicians” list, so I sent him a free copy.

At some point later, the guy mails me, explaining to me how he’d gone through the whole five and a half hours of the documentary, and he hadn’t heard any of his music; where was it? So I went through the e-mail trails, and discovered it was that guy and mailed him and went “Oops, sorry, I didn’t use you and I sent it by mistake. Enjoy the free copy.”

Well, from the torrent of profanity, hatred and criticism that I got back, I can now report to you that the BBS Documentary series is not very enjoyable if you’re going to be doing nothing but listening intently for your own music to appear and it never does. If you’re in that group, please, reconsider buying or acquiring a copy.

To make the music work in my film, it was often necessary to do insane surgery to the original files. In one case (the Fidonet episode) there are cases where I mixed together five separate songs, usually solo guitar pieces, cutting out all the singing (which tended to be terrible and distracting) and just using the strumming (which was generally good background). If you were to see the cuts in my video editor, it’d look like someone’s evil science project; or a railroad track. Cuts were as short as one second and as long as thirty seconds. Except for the fact I listed them in the credits, there’d be no way for most people to pick out any song out of that goulash. But damn if it didn’t work!

As an illustration, here’s an MP3 of the guitar trickery from the middle of the Fidonet episode. (2mb MP3, 04:23) If you concentrate on the guitar playing, you’ll notice the repeating themes, the copies of smaller clips, and the way the music changes. Once I draw your attention to it, it’s hard to miss. I can do this, because Creative Commons attribution-sharealike lets me.

I think that as time goes on, and the ease by which Creative Commons is integrated into things like Flickr and weblogging software, a lot of people are being given the push to license their works in ways they haven’t thought through, just like a ton of people click through End Use License Agreements without thinking them through.

I get calls from people to seek permission to “do things” to the BBS Documentary. I’ve had schools call me for permission to show it to classes. I get calls from people to use clips from it for presentations. I get e-mails where startups who want to stream video offer to buy the “rights” to my films. But the answer is always the same: I already gave permission. Do anything you want. Forever. For free. But what you do with it has to also have the same permissions to let anyone do anything they want, forever, for free.

I watched a young lady who put up modelling photos of herself demand they be taken down from the Internet and never distributed again. Apparently she didn’t like the attention her photos had earned. Well, guess what. She licensed them Creative Commons, and she was over 18 at the time. Sorry, nice lady. Your image is everywhere. Forever. For free.

As people see their stuff show up in commercial works, remixed like crazy, and their names in tiny print or off to the side, I wonder how many are going to stand there and complain that they didn’t in fact license their stuff to be that way. That they licensed it creative commons, but not THAT common.

And the real fun hasn’t really started.

As time goes on, the chances of there being a “money” situation increase. And there’s going to be a money situation at some point. Something where $10,000 is at stake, the difference between being paid a royalty for something and not. The difference between a work being a part of a major motion picture, the artist compensated, and not. And through all this Creative Commons hasn’t been tested to a large degree in court.

Make no mistake: my next documentaries will both be Creative Commons licensed. I read the contracts and I like what I saw. But I actually read the contracts.

I wonder, from my own little observations, how many companions I have in that.

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I try to keep my environs as clean and orderly as possible, partially because it makes me feel better, and partially because I like to fight the stereotype of a nerd trapped in endless boxes and papers, unable to keep track of anything, dying quietly behind one of the piles. It’s a good goal, in general.

However, the good and bad news is that I can’t do that at the moment. Now, as GET LAMP heats up, as the shipment of Apple II material is being sorted, as scanning has re-commenced, the “stuff” is winning once more. If you came into my office right now, you’d assume I ran a bookie operation or my startup had failed.

There’s already fruits of my labor, though! A nice scan of the original 1982 Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner (rest in peace) which in some ways is a vital link of the chain that started the First-Person Shooter genre. The documentation I scanned in even has a German-to-English dictionary so you can understand what the digitized voices are saying! (Although, generally, you should run like hell no matter what it is they’re saying.)

Not surprising, a lot of the Apple II disks I’m scanning have bad sectors or are dead. In a few of those cases, the bad sectors have long ago been avoided by the software on the Apple and I was able to rescue them anyway. Happily, I can report the acquisition of at least two dozen new textfiles circa 1982-1983! They’ll be on the main site shortly as well. (Just to explain how I get the data off, and then take the data and get the text out of it, I’ll just quickly link to Apple Disk Transfer, the AppleWin emulator, and Ciderpress).

Editing/culling continues for the movie, of course, with a bunch of interviews gone through and a bunch more scheduled for this summer. I suspect I’m going to spend a week on the West Coast, probably around the Penny Arcade expo, and go crazy traveling up and down the coast doing interviews. But not in a car with California plates!

The mess will probably last the rest of the year. It’s the mess of a busy workbench, not a neglected one. Let’s see what comes out of it.

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I first heard about the demoscene group known as Hornet not by their demos, their music, or their graphics – I heard about them because of their incredible archiving ability. In the early 1990s, when disk space was not cheap at all and yet many people were creating demos and music of great quality, it was hornet that swung together the Hornet Archive. The Hornet archive was the go-to place for all manner of scene-related materials, especially music, which they not only slavishly collated and allowed additions to via an easy-to-use interface, but who also would take the time to rate and quality the music whenever possible. Five stars from the Hornet Archive and you felt like you were two steps away from a limo and penthouse hotel rooms.

Affiliated with cdrom.com (the Walnut Creek CD-ROM company), the Hornet Archive was hosted on a fantastically fat pipe and was eventually turned into an actual product, a collection of music and MODs with great art and content called Hornet Mods 1. And when I mean great, I mean fantastically great, the kind of attention to detail and quality that meant that everything on that Disc was being given the right treatment deserving of the man-years of work behind them all. Trust me when I say that I browsed this thing after buying my copy and I thought “Wow, this is how things should be presented”. Later, a sequel disc (Hornet Mods 2) was equally top-notch, with even more of that great music I’d fallen in love with, and even made a little of myself.

I bumped into the Hornet guys at an event called NAID in 1996, where they had copies for sale that I bought. I didn’t get much time with them, but there’s actually pictures of me with some of them (while wearing a cow suit) and I’ve become good friends with some of the members over the years.

Naturally, when I found out that they had created an actual DVD of demos, called Mindcandy Volume 1: PC Demos, I was right there in line to get my copies. (I bought a couple.) I hadn’t heard much from Hornet since the 1990s and here it was 2003, years having passed. But I suspected they’d put as much effort into making a DVD as they had doing the CD-ROMs before, and was I not surprised when they’d done it. The thing absolutely ruled. With an amazing attention to detail, history and completeness, they’d assembled in DVD form pretty much all the biggest influences in PC demos from the previous years, going back over a decade in some places. The colors were clean, the menus cool, the bonus features and commentary tracks impeccable. As I had hoped, they’d outdone themselves.

Four years have passed since the release of Mindcandy, and while many people who had bought the first DVD knew a sequel was coming, things started to look a little bleak after a couple of years. And then, out of the blue, the Hornet guys have released Mindcandy 2: Amiga Demos.

If by some weird trick of nature you’ve gotten this far into this review without knowing what exactly I mean by “demos”, then I will reward your perseverance. The short-form story is this: way back in the 1980s, pirate groups would “crack” software so that you didn’t have to duplicate the whole disk to transfer programs across modems. In doing this work, which often involved meticulous work inside machine language, they would reward themselves not with money, but by adding a “crack screen” before the program started. The program would start, say “This game cracked by the Eye of Argon”, and then when you hit a key, it would start the “actual” program, that is, the cracked program that used to take a disk.

Over time, these “crack screens” became more and more elaborate, involving not only music and graphics, but harder and harder trickery to impress the viewer before handing off control to the program. After a while, in fact, pirate groups had to have people whose only job within the pirate group was to make these crack screens. Somewhere towards the latter half of the 1980s, these programmers of effects and music for crack screens started making standalone versions of their programs, to demonstrate their skills – “demos”. And from there it just took off. Demos come out by the droves even in the modern day; a website called scene.org keeps track of them. And yes, the parties where these come out are called “Demo Parties”, and I’m hosting one myself.

Here’s the thing, however: as time has gone on, the ability to play the demos as they were intended is rapidly disappearing. “But what of emulators”, you cry, unaware that emulators are not always great at capturing the exotic aspects of the hardware and software. In the case of demos, the problem is especially an issue because these programs would use every secret trick culled out of the hardware to achieve their looks. In this world where we install a separate card to do the heavy lifting of graphics and 3D processing, demos of 10 and 15 years ago had to rely 100% on software-based rendering. While that might automatically make people think the demos were slow and broken, in fact they were as fast as lightning and truly amazing – on the original hardware. That hardware is nearly gone.

So the importance of something like the Mindcandy series is that they work so hard to make sure that these now-historical programs are captured as perfectly as possible. Frame rates, color hacks, video signal noise… the Hornet guys concern themselves with issues that you as the Person Who Wants To See These Things should never have to deal with. That was reflected in Mindcandy 1, and it’s even more the case in Mindcandy 2.

The menu system of Mindcandy 2 immediately tells you you’re in for a quality ride.

The menus are clean, slick, and peppered with quality animations shifting between them. Normally I hate that stuff, but that’s for static films containing nothing worth the sound and fury of background music in menus. In this case, it works great because it gets you in the mood; thumping bass and classic sound.

As mentioned above, the first volume was for demos that appeared on IBM Compatibles/PCs, but this volume focuses on the Commodore Amiga, which was a powerhouse graphics and sound machine that came out in 1986. Very quickly, people started creating crack screens and demos that put anything else out there to shame. The 4-channel sound, the high-res graphics and pallette of colors, really blew folks away; I remember arguing with someone I played some tape-recorded amiga music to. “That’s not from a computer, that’s some album.” So, as you can imagine, the demos that starting coming out for the Amiga were unstoppable, and only got better.

On the DVD are many of the “canonical” demos of the past 15 years, demos that won competitions, wowed kids who downloaded them from BBSes, and which pushed the limits of what the machines could do year after year. They’re methodically captured from the original hardware, using techniques covered in detail in production notes. You know when people are capturing uncompressed video from hacked converters, you’re getting the best quality you can achieve.

All of the soundtracks to these demos are recorded in both “original” mode and, in a nice fit of hubris, Dolby 5:1 Surround. The audio tracks have another quality bonus – commentary tracks from either the original coders of the demos, or experts doing their best to describe the context and techniques involved. It’s one thing to hear the soundtrack in 5:1, but a whole other to hear how little time the coders gave themsleves to do some effects, or what part alcohol played in the proceedings.

The demos themselves, of course, are just great to look at. Here’s some screenshots I took of some of them:

On the Mindcandy 2 DVD is also what I consider the crown jewel: a documentary about the 2005 Breakpoint Demo Party, Shot over the weekend of Breakpoint from the point of view of an attendee. Impeccably edited, beautiful, and full of the energy of how these parties go, it captures a lot of the feeling of the parties that have given birth to demos. It’s even got its own commentary track from the director/editor. I see techniques in there I intend to steal shamelessly for years to come.

What I’m saying here, if it’s not clear, is that if you have even the slightest interest in demos, in old computers, in graphics as an art form, this DVD is for you. I’m proud to have it on my shelf, and my only regret is that there aren’t more of them in the series. Two is not enough; I hope they keep doing these forever.

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40 interviews have been done for GET LAMP. I’d hoped to do 100 for this film, but that was a rough guess and when production wraps up later this year, I’ll have what I have. It probably makes more sense to say I’d be perfectly fine with doing 100 interviews or more, and that we’ll see what comes of my efforts.

My documentary is mostly about things that happened, not things that are happening, so as a result it ends up being a case of tracking people down years or even decades after the fact. And people have different opinions about going in front of a camera to talk of such subjects.

I’ve had a couple people flat out say no. A couple people don’t respond to me even though I know they’ve been told of what I’m up to. Others have said they’ll think about it. On the flip side, I’ve been contacted out of the blue by people, been introduced to folks by others, and successfully tracked down and gotten interviews with dozens.

With the BBS Documentary, I was spoiled because besides the “top figures”, I could also interview “anyone who used a BBS”. That makes less sense here, and I’m mostly going for people directly involved in either creation or observation (academic, review, journalistic) of text adventures. This is, you will be shocked to hear, a relatively small group of folks.

The interviews themselves, now that I am culling through them, yield wonderful insights. I’m lucky to have gotten a hold of some very brilliant, well-spoken people. They know what they know and can articulate it beautifully. When you’re conducting a (good, non-scripted) interview, stuff goes by that you don’t notice because you’re formulating the next question. Now that I’m listening to them, some of the things people have said to me are exquisite. I hope to string these jewels together in a pretty necklace indeed.

As I progress down the list, as I contact people and get back responses and talk about what I’m doing, one thing is clear: I chose a good project. How much justice I do it is another situation entirely, but the subject is there, is worthwhile, will have been worth the two years of work. I don’t get bored of it, never feel it’s not worth doing, and look forward to each and every interview.

Life could be worse, now couldn’t it.

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Every once in a while, I’d like to point out the historical/archival efforts of others, and encourage you to take some time to check them out. We’ll start out simple, but well: DNA Lounge.

The DNA Lounge is a nightclub/club in San Francisco. It has a range of shows it puts on, including touring acts, local bands, and nights with just a lot of people and music blasting over the speakers. Running this whole show is a guy named Jamie Zawinski.

I’ve never met Jamie Zawinski, but I’ve certainly used stuff he programmed as a result of working for Netscape in the 1990s, I’ve played with the really amazing screensaver project he’s been involved with, and I’ve been a rabid reader of his jwz website for many years now. He’s a complicated person, with interests I don’t share and opinions I don’t share but many that I do and a method of describing things in the world that I enjoy reading.

He resigned from Mozilla/Netscape/AOL in 1999, loaded with some cash, and unaware that he had gotten out before things really went downhill in the tech world for a while. So he kind of disappeared there, and then he announced he was opening a nightclub. This struck me, at the time, as spectacularly weird, tangential and strange. But it was his money and his time and he was still updating his website, so that worked for me.

But Jamie is a programmer and engineer, and so he approached this new phase of his life with lessons and outlook he’d used before, and this is where it gets interesting. He kept a weblog of the entire experience, telling you sometimes day to day what was going on with the DNA Lounge project, the money, the hassles, the heartbreak, and the sleaziness of the San Francisco political machine.

The journey starts here, with a historical background of the building his club was in, and then it follows through the present day.

It is, in a word, spectacular. Every weblog entry is a joy, with the elations, depressions and brutality of following one’s dreams. And not to give anything away, but the club does ultimately open, take in acts, and he just keeps weblogging, giving you a unique perspective as a club owner and chief bottle-washer. I find it magical.

As an extra bonus, when he opened the club, he added audio and video livecasting to the club, so that you could see and hear the whole event from your desktop! In fact, some acts told him they wouldn’t perform unless the cameras/feeds were turned off. Result? He wouldn’t let them perform. For years, I’d be working on my projects, and plug into these video/audio feeds so I could be “at the club” while doing my archiving/describing.

During the production of the documentary, I found myself with an extra evening in San Francisco, staying at a buddy’s place but not having any interviews lined up. I had been reading the DNA weblog for years at that point, something like 3 or 4, and I had always hoped I could go there. I figured out the address, made my way down, and walked right in.

It turned out the club was closed, but the front doors were unlocked, because a couple people were borrowing the club space (with jwz’s permission) to do some final sorting/stapling of a zine that was about to ship. I stumbled around into one of the people there, and she was kind enough to give me a tour. It was glorious: there were the welds I’d heard about, the stairs he’d had issues with, the stage layout he’d chosen, the missing walls, the bathrooms, the televisions… I pointed out everything as we went, and she was able to show me where each of the cameras was located. I also saw (but couldn’t enter, obviously) an amazingly cool private space jwz had built for himself within the club so he’d always have a great seat. Good for him!

I bought my DNA t-shirt, bought a few other items, and walked out into the night, forever linked.

It’ll probably take most people days to read through the weblog entries, but I promise you, they’re worth it, all of them. And it’s absolutely true, and absolutely free. A treasure.

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I’m always acquiring new computer history in various forms to add to my collections. Sometimes it’s as simple as an e-mail attachment, and other times it’s physical artifacts. In yet other cases, I get sent stuff in the mail in great and terrifying piles:

These come from an Ebay auction held by a Mr. Tadros. 120 pounds of Apple II related material, including a monitor, two Apple ][+ machines (one loaded with cards), a pile of printouts, a pile of software, a pile of books, a pile of manuals, and a pile of other related material.

We talked a bit on the phone about all this stuff. He got the computer in 1979 and for a machine that is basically 28 years old, it looks brand new. He also added a bunch of cards, and kept the original boxes for a lot of this stuff, so it’s currently still packed in them. As for machines themselves, it’s interesting to see all the little tricks and hacks done to the Apples to make them run better; a mod for lowercase, a card to add 16k of memory, connectors for serial cables, all stuck into this old casing that Wozniak designed for people to do just these sorts of things.

So what happens to all this? Well, everything scannable will be scanned and put on DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM; the disk images that aren’t private material will be scanned in and put online, with the textfiles specially removed to go on textfiles.com; the BBSes mentioned in printouts and in textfiles will go on the BBS List, and I will carefully make a place for all this stuff in my lab. So, I like to think, this has all gone to a good home. More will be told about stuff from this collection as it comes to light.

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