ASCII by Jason Scott

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.

2 Comments

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.

2 Comments

The Demo Party I’m co-organizing in April just got a boost: the release of our official invite, which gives you some details about the party and hypnotizes you into wanting to go. Please go ahead and download it. (Requires Direct X 9 and Windows).

There’s a tradition that’s now many years old of a demoparty putting out an “invite” in the form of a program, which contains effects and music and tells you to go. It’s like writing a song that invites you to a song-writing contest. In fact, a number of the interactive fiction (text adventure) competitions over the years have included invitations or ballots in the form of text adventures…

The production was done by Northern Dragons, who are attending the event and entering a few contests; and you can see the general “scene” getting their shots in at the Pouet forums.

If you were only idly thinking about BLOCKPARTY and NOTACON before, this is your time to jump in. Pre-registrations are still cheap, it’s a fantastic event, and I’m going to be working my butt off to add a layer of fun on top of the already-existent fun that the Notacon folks pack into their conference. I promise you… a fantastic time awaits.

Comments Off on Blockparty UPDATE: Blockparty Invitation!

It’s amazing how a place could be the source of so many memories, especially when that place is a mall. A dead mall.

By the time I had moved away from Fishkill, NY in the late 1980s, the Dutchess Mall was already “The Dead Mall”; the superior and awesome power of the South Hills Mall of nearby Poughkeepsie, which was many times bigger and had started to suck other smaller plazas into itself, ensured that it would never again get the critical mass it needed to survive. Once, however, it thrived handily.

Conveniently located by Interstate 84, Dutchess was a short car ride both from my original home in Hopewell Junction and from the condo complex in East Fishkill we moved to after the divorce. I had to beg for a ride from my mom to go there, and it was not a case of it being a place I could go hang out at via a short walk or skateboard ride; to go there was an event. To me, it was the Biggest Thing Ever, both in terms of size and grandeur.

It had two anchor stores: a Macy’s (later Jamesway) on one side and a Service Merchandise on the other. In between was probably something like 25 stores, ranging from such steadfast mall fixtures as a Radio Shack, Spencer Gifts, to a 4-screen movie theatre tucked in the back. It was where I got my taste for a drink called an “Orange Julius”, which was sold at the mall from an odd little space, and which had a logo of a devil sitting on an orange which is long since gone from that franchise. Most importantly, The Dutchess Mall had an arcade. My arcade, the one from which I form probably 70-80 percent of what I visualize a “videogame arcade” was and should always be. It’s where I first saw Frogger, Zaxxon, Atari Football, Hercules, Donkey Kong, Fire Truck, Xenon… probably a dozen others that I encountered, during that true golden age of video games when it felt like every game was completely new, nothing was cliche’, magic factories in faraway lands producing these incredible boxes of fun waiting for my quarters and my time…

As an aside, It is quite amazing that I can sit and really see, with sparkling clarity, the first time I encountered many of the classics of video games. The place in Poughkeepsie I was standing at when I saw Food Fight. The Ground Round restaurant I stumbled around in and found Ms. Pac-Man. The Nathan’s hot dogs in Yonkers New York that was probably the largest arcade I ever set foot in, where I saw test versions of games that disappeared forever, and others that ultimately went everywhere like Q*Bert and Crystal Castles. I am there, right now, as I speak of them, a crazy little kid with really big messed hair and ill-fitting clothes, loving these games.

The other huge draw for me was the Service Merchandise, which was located on the opposite end of Dutchess from the arcade. Service Merchandise was one crappy enterprise, obvious to me even at that young age. But one thing it did have was home computers for sale. Lots of them. The computers were in a sort of electronics-and-complicated-crap section of the store, near the mall entrance but away from the jewelry and accessories sections, which I think is where they made most of their money.

This was more than a store. This was my lab. My mother could not afford a home computer in that period, and it would be 1981 before I had an IBM PC dependably at my father’s house. So from 1979 to 1983, Dutchess was how I experimented with all the other brands of home computer that were out there. It’s where I saw the Atari 400, that odd membrane-keyboard laden alien workpiece, and the laughable but fascinating Timex Sinclair. It’s where I saw a TI 99/4a play the cockroach game, where I could leaf through all the different software for sale for these brands, and where I could dream of owning them all. The marketing was designed to attract forward-thinking families and businesses. I was, whether they planned this to be the case or not, absolutely hypnotized and fascinated with it. When the Atari’s packaging made promises, I believed those promises. When the signs above the TI told you it was capable of so much power, I crackled with that implied power. I was indoctrinated into the dream, utterly and completely, and I’ve not woken from that dream yet. When I do, that’s how I’ll know I’m dead.

Obviously, all of this wraps into the work I’ve done as a nostalgia and history person, scrambling around and trying to capture as much of this history before it disappears under our feet, yesterday’s news, last decade’s thoughts.

The Dutchess Mall is slowly disappearing now, with the center of it flattened and replaced with a Home Depot. The portion of the mall that had the arcade is now gone, ripped down and turned into blacktop again.

What got me thinking about this is that there’s a new documentary that’s come out called Fish Kill Flea, which takes place at the husk of the Dutchess Mall, where until recently, there was a flea market that ran inside the old Service Merchandise. I have no doubt this film has it’s own merits and pitfalls, but I know that I will be the first in line to buy a copy of it on DVD; just to see people walking around the room that held my original home computer dreams makes it an instant win. The name of the documentary plays off the town name (Fishkill) which means “River of Fish”. (Kill is dutch for River). I’m sure it’s weird for people to see that name; for me, it’s coming home again.

9 Comments

Unfortunately, I have succeeded in crashing my machine twice, losing two revisions of a weblog entry. At that point, the third would have been destined for a hash-slung version of what came before, my tired eyes attempting to gain magic easily lost and replacing it with something quite inferior. So, I’ll do something else, and just make a small observation.

More and more, there are food-like products on the shelves, sold to be pure versions of a type of food, but in fact a somewhat horrible non-version of it. For example, there are fruit juices for sale that have no fruit juice in them, or a laughably small amount, say 5%, with the rest primarily being sugar and water. I’m always kind of wondering who buys these things, willingly purchasing something that contains very little of what that product supposedly is. It can’t be healthy, and maybe it’s just a matter of the product being less expensive, or maybe they don’t know any better and don’t think about it. Either way, you end up with bread that has little grain, juice that has no fruit, seafood that has no fish, soda that doesn’t have anything. One side of me thinks this is a company that hates people, giving them the worst possible iteration of something for the purposes of greed. But another worries me even more: that they went out, asked people, checked up on things, did studies, and found out this is precisely what people want and wish to have. In that case, they are entirely doing what they’re supposed to be doing: satisfying customers. If this is the case, I feel very lonely.

Similarly, there’s a trend that’s been around a very long time that I hate: using movies as historical footage. I’ve seen American Graffiti used as historical footage of the 1950s, Apocalypse Now used as historical footage of various American-involved wars, and now Hackers is being used as footage showing the history of computer hacking. Movies are never made with the intent of being all that accurate; they’re made to entertain and often use a historical situation as a backdrop to a character-driven drama in the foreground between made-up characters. Often these characters are combinations of real people, or derivatives of a real person, or say things that someone else unrelated said. The whole thing is a blender of reality, designed to take you from one end of the movie and lay you down at the other, belly full of popcorn, eyes full of lights. To use this material (as news programs often do) as representative footage of events and places referenced in the “story” is on the same level as using songs by Chubby Checker as replacement “footage” of a Martin Luther King speech. Yet it happens constantly. Radio programs, even supposedly journalistic ones, do this as well.

So the question is, do they simply hate and disrespect their audiences? Or did they go out and ask and find out this is exactly what the audiences want? Is a sleepy-eyed Angelina Jolie going to be the iconic representation of computer hacking for the next 15 years, as it has for the last 15? Can’t we do better?

5 Comments

Back in September, I talked about the Little Theatre. I still haven’t gone back there; and I may never again. I figured I’d talk more about The Big Theatre, which is where I go, and why.

The Big Theatre is located in Woburn, and is a part of a chain, so indistinct that I sometimes forget what chain until it shows up on the screen. I think it’s changed owners a few times, although they’ve done almost nothing to affect it in any interesting fashion. It’s pretty fuckin’ huge, as far as these things go. You can look at a satellite picture of it here. One thing you’ll note is that it’s huge. Another is that it’s in a huge parking lot, which I’ve never ever seen filled ever. On summer nights, a carnival rolls through town and takes up the space on the left, but even with a full carnival on the parking lot, there’s lot of space left.

So the Big Theatre has, basically, three things going for it over me just seeing stuff at home.

It has first-run movies. Yes, I can download stuff if I’m lucky, but at the end of the day, it does all look better on a big screen with the sound blasting, so if the movie I’m interested in seeing is playing and I want to see it in a big theater, this is the place to go. Obviously if I can wait for it on DVD or for a download, I’ll do that.

It has very late showtimes. In an anemic little town that is lucky to have showings past 10pm, even in the middle of the goddamned city, the Big Theater has showings after midnight. It’s not uncommon to have showtimes of midnight, 12:10, 12:30, and even 12:45am. This works for me because I’m always cranking on projects and get wrapped up in them. I look up, go “oh crap” and see it’s 11:30. With a showing of 12:30am, I really have no excuse; if I couldn’t get the night’s work done or at a cutoff point by midnight, then I’m seriously screwed up anyway and the inability to see the movie is the least of my concerns. This point, alone, probably is responsible for half of my interest in The Big Theater when I’m looking to see a film.

It is totally in the wrong place. Or, more accurately, someone long ago decided this was the place for a movie theater that was the size of a ocean liner sitting on top of a home depot. Whoever he was, he was totally wrong. The Big Theater gets crowds, but not of any notable size. As a result, I often cruise into my 12:30am showing and there is nobody else there. In fact, with very few exceptions, I am almost always the only one in there, unless my buddy Mark comes along with me. It’s like my own private theater, and that automatically obviates any of the usual complaints about going to see a movie in the modern era: cellphones, chatty people, kids, poor seats. I’m it! I can whip out my cell and call people incessantly and talk to them about kids, because hell, it’s my theater.

So what doesn’t it have for going for it? Quite a few things, of course.

It’s expensive. 9 bucks to see a film. So it better be one hellishly good film; I’m not going to go wander in and “hope” the movie I’m seeing is good. It better be something I’m expecting to know is good, or be something that I’m “required” to see, like a specific cultural touchstone or film covering a subject I’m supposed to know about. Additionally, going to see these movies automatically costs me twice as much because I live under the credo of Lessig’s Challenge. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t agree with Mr. Lessig about, but there’s a lot I do, and the challenge to give as much or more money to organizations fighting for more freedoms than organizations taking it away stays fresh in my mind every time I give the Big Theater a ten spot. So really, it’s very expensive.

The projectionist is either a robot, a prisoner on work-release, or a show pony with a stick. While the advantages of having a theater to myself and being able to go late in the day is great, they don’t have very good people working the boxes. I’ve seen quite a few flicks slightly out of focus, or with the side sound channels not turned on, or with the volume a tad low, and so on.

Nobody gives a shit. The guy who takes my ticket is totally zoned out. The people who walk around are zoned out. The rare families I see are talking among themselves. There’s a “social space” of tables near a snack bar, but the snack bar is always closed, and really, nobody would want to sit over there anyway. There’s even an arcade, full of about 4 games I don’t care about. The decor is “hey, look what the central office mailed us this week”. The people at the snack bar are so zoned that they make the other zoned people working the ticket booth seem like royal guards by comparison. It’s just not a happy place. That can be kind of a downer.

The lack of people is kind of eerie. I have had times where I walk out of the theater and there is literally nobody there. I mean, absolutely nobody. I suspect the manager’s in his office or someone’s cleaning another screening area or whatever, but the illusion of it being only me (or me and mark) and nobody else is pretty whacky.

I have theaters I go to if the movie is so utterly critical, I want the experience of being in a room of people, or if the attendees I’ve been invited to go with don’t feel like driving out to where I usually go. There’s a nice theater downtown which I will go to (I saw Lord of the Rings and Snakes on a Plane there). But otherwise, it’s the ol’ Big Theater for my occasional movie jaunts.

If I give the impression my interaction with movie theaters is kind of tenuous, well, it really is. If the Big Theater burned down, it wouldn’t overly ruin my life, and based on its size, it’d burn for weeks. The best it can really do is “Hey, it’s late”, and “Hey, it’s sort of like being home”. Not overly compelling, but a nice little addition when, well… when it’s late.

3 Comments

Well, my recent post about the death of the container for ethereal goods got some people stopping by with ice picks, and they knocked a few chunks of additional ideas out of my Brain Iceberg, so let’s go over that.

First, let me be clear in saying that I wasn’t going “bwa ha ha, goodbye packaging and good riddance”. If you can make something worthwhile that deserves packaging and which contains things that are nice to have, it makes sense. But if you’re going to just drop in a DVD with a single-color label and an amray case with a dropped-in color-duped paper, then what the heck? In the case of a lot of the products out there, especially the poorly-maintained “classics” I alluded to, the packaging is doing almost nothing relative to the product. If, however, the package is contributing to the overall usefulness of the product (say, a DVD combined with a book combined with something else), then it makes total sense to sell the package form. (An example of this that comes to mind is Guitar Hero II, which has the game and a guitar controller and some stickers.) I myself intend to do this, so yes, I totally see doing packaging as a worthwhile venture.

Additionally, I’m not ruling out the possibility of ARCADE coming out in a box. If I do in fact release it in a box, it’s also going to be a really nice box. It will also possibly be as much as 4 DVDs, plus who knows what else collected inside.

All I was saying was that I have the opinion that by 2010 a “box” in a “store” or “mailed to you” might not be the best methodology for distributing whatever the final work is. If it is, then of course I’ll do it. Trends, however, make me feel like there’s going to be a better way in force by that time. And that’s what I felt walking through the store.

Flack made the assertion that I was probably thinking more along the lines of consoles, where the “vertical integration” is now in such a locked turbo mode that you may not be able to buy your console games any other way. There’s a good point there, and I think that games on consoles could likely become these open-ended new-content-everyday sorts of games where you have this initial insane download that goes to the machine followed by daily or weekly updates of stuff, so you suddenly find out there’s a new track or a new level and your account was just debited by $5. In these cases, boxes won’t be around.

Robb Sherwin points out that the downloads inevitably come encumbered with restrictions and are often tied to the continued operation of machines that are not your own, meaning that if they die, your stuff dies. While it’s possible to go and play Mario from a cartridge 20 years old and have it work, once the Nintendo Wii service goes away some day, that’s it for all the “channels” you bought. Good point for him, too. Obviously, just like I don’t put out crippled DVDs with Macrovision and region encoding, I wouldn’t put out anything that “phoned home” or otherwise demanded it “be” somewhere to function, so you can watch it on your holo-headphones or whatever with impunity, forever.

The thing I didn’t bring up in the previous entry is how much of a long-shot bet boxes are.

Bear in mind that for the BBS Documentary, there was a $27,000 bill associated with the packaging and duplication. That’s just duplicating DVDs and the cardboard case and putting it together and getting it sent to me. The rest of the documentary budget had already been spent and this nearly doubled the most obvious expenses for the project. GET LAMP will have a similar bill, I’m sure, possibly worse because of some of the tricky stuff I’m already in negotiations with that’s being worked out. That’s some scary money, and it scares me to even idly think of it now. This was the driving force behind aggressively pre-selling the documentary the last time, because I can’t just blow out that kind of cash out of my mad money. I made that money back, make no mistake, but that’s the inherent risk. (You can also, perhaps, see why making the whole thing Creative Commons seemed a bit of an additional insane risk as well, although it ended up becoming a selling point.)

I still hold that the shift will be gradual but distinct; a heavier and heavier reliance on a network component to recieve new “stuff”, until not getting “stuff” that way is the exception. I have no problem being the exception, if it makes sense to be.

1 Comment

Someone did it! They took what I do and “Web 2.0-ified” it!

The name of the site is SCRIBD.COM and it’s got all the now-cliche aspects of Web 2.0: the reflective, this-side-of-children’s toys logo, the insane flash doohickey interface to everything, the half-assed message posting aspect, and of course the link-in to a bunch of “convergence”, i.e. money-making things, like linking to a print service and then having “yahoo this”, “digg this”, “reddit this”, “send more traffic to us so we can have ads up”. Additionally, you get the classic “profile” as Web 2.0 sites like to do it, with a photo and a bunch of dashedly written sentences about nothing in particular.

Does this make me happy? Well, I always have mixed feelings about this. There’s a part of me, for example, that wants me to shoot myself in the face in the ER of a hospital, so they can revive me, so I can shoot myself in the face again.

The other part of me, however, is always fascinated by little toys when they show up, and the fact that this toy is dedicated to documents and writing instead of video, and then potentially the quality of the artifacts being uploaded could be better than what they have on YouTube, hey, never let it be said I’m against a little browsing.

Unlike YouTube, however, where you often have copyright violation of items nobody cares about (snippets of 20-year-old public access cable and rare recordings of commercials of companies long dead), I can’t help but feel that people, and by people I mean copyright holders, are going to care about things like the entire O’Reilly Library, ‘Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt, and the Amber series by Roger Zelazny. Even in its relative youth, this website is loaded over with people uploading straight-up books and magazines and novels. The term often used by parties duplicating written works without authorization is “bookwarez”. Maybe they should have called it ‘Bookwrz”. and made a pretty logo. Oh wait, they did, but they spelled it SCRIBD.

Also never let it be said that I’m against a little copyright violation here and there; the copyright law in the US is a little over the top right now and covers all sorts of things that should probably expire a lot sooner than up to 90 years after the death of the creator. There are probably a few things on textfiles.com that could stand to be removed, although I do my best to keep that under control and make hard choices along that line. But here we have a case that a company is basically set up as a rape-tastic “bookwarez” fest, and is trying the old Napster/Youtube/Bittorrent trick: build a company that permits wholesale copying of a type of data, ignore that a lot of that data normally comes up for sale in stores, and wait for someone big to buy you out. If you ever read the book “All the Rave”, which is about Napster (and who knows, it’ll probably show up on Scribd any minute now), it’s pretty clear that the business plan of Napster was “keep ignoring everything until we’re so big a music company buys us out” and it was only greed on the part of some parties with Napster that made this fail. YouTube kind of ignores copyright (although they got better about responding to takedown notices) and they got bought out by Google.

I am a child of Ascii Express lines, of pirate BBSes and “legit” BBSes that had secret sides accessible by password or a different phone number. I claim no moral high ground here, and there is a lot to be mined in that relationship I and others had in our youth with regards to computer software and “warez” trading. But you know, the general sense of it wasn’t to look at it as a business model. I think that’s sort of what makes it icky for me. The fact that they would have a currently-in-stores book up there and then have a service where you could use a print server and pay to get the PDF printed… there’s some line their little moneywagon just crossed.

I must state again that their little tools are neat: things that will transfer a book into MP3 (i.e. read it using a text-to-speech converter) and analysis/statistics of the book that show the wordcounts and how this compares to the “average” item. You can download these items as textfiles and as PDF files, although they screw the name up pretty badly to make sure the filename is unique: the 2006 Taschen Catalog is renamed to “fwcrv8q7y1iac.pdf”, which doesn’t really give me a sense of what’s located inside.

One tool that I actually like a lot is the “analytics”, which watches who downloads/view a given document and shows maps of where they came from, logs of who came from where, and so on. That sort of stuff is neat. I wish it wasn’t some locked-away piece of a bookwarez site, of course.

And so we come again to my main reaction. How neat, how weird, how doomed. Fascinating, some interesting ideas, but surrounded by lame little messages, whack-ass profiles, and complete copyrighted works held up for the taking. And it’s not even in Sweden.

I don’t think I’ll take textfiles.com down yet; I think it still has a niche that SCRIBD isn’t fulfilling. As you might expect, I get the occasional suggestion that I should turn my site into something not unlike what SCRIBD is; more user interaction, ability of people to upload textfiles, to have “profiles”, to comment on each textfile, and so on. To these people, I can now point to SCRIBD and say “And this is what it would look like.” A gigantic, farting zeppelin of web 2.0 lazily rising into the sky to grab a little piece of the money sun before exploding in flames. Will they make it to the safety of the moon before they’re caught out for facilitating book piracy as a business model?

The race is on. Good luck, bastards.

2 Comments

I stopped by the store today because I needed more disk space. I walked out with 1.5 terabytes of disk space. Perhaps this is a sign the world is not the way it’s always been.

As I wandered around the aisles looking at other crap for sale, I found myself in the various sections that sell “software”, that is, stuff you shove into something else to make that something else do something. That includes computer programs, CDs, DVDs, console games, and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. And I think it was then that it really hit me: this is all going away.

Packaging serves two purposes, maybe three. It provides protection for the product inside from rot or abuse or water or whatever. It can function as enticement for people walking by it or seeing it somewhere. And, I suppose, it could also make it easier to contain lots of that object for shipping/transport.

Let’s confine ourselves to considering books, record albums and computer software, because otherwise we’ll be here all day.

Take the packaging of a book. A stack of papers, printed with words and pictures on them, bound up using a bunch of different methods. The quality can range from amazingly crappy to thousands of dollars of rare materials. In this case, you’re not protecting the stuff inside: the words and pages are not that overly fragile, although it’s nice to have them all facing in the right direction. Instead the packaging (the cover and surrounding material) is often the first line of attraction for the casual passerby, telling them that the words and pictures inside should be looked at. Thought goes into the design of the cover to make people want to pick it up, otherwise it doesn’t matter what quality the words are inside, because nobody’s going to read it. Placement within a bookstore helps sell it, but even when there’s stacks of these books with just the binders sticking out at you, they’re still designed to summon you in some way. Books have been around for hundreds of years.

We don’t do record vinyl anymore, but when we did, they were large cardboard squares which contained records inside, and the front cover would show you a picture of the band inside or maybe a nearly naked girl who didn’t know the band at all, and the back would be a bunch of words telling you how fantastic the music was or indicating what songs were located inside and how long the songs were. (Naturally, there were variations to all this.) In the stores that carried records, you’d have huge bins of the cardboard squares and you’d flip through them or ask someone who spent a lot of time flipping through them to find something for you.

Computer software comes relatively late in all this, showing up in the mid 1970s in stores. In the case of the packaging for software, you would generally get a box or a bag. Actually, at first it tended to be a bag but later it was a box and then later it was a very large box. Inside would be a cassette tape or a floppy disk or a bunch of floppy disks and a big printed manual. When computer companies had a lot of money, everything would be in color, otherwise it would all be in black and white or single-color. The box changed shapes over the years, ranging from looking like a record sleeve to a piece of folded cardboard with the manual and floppy shrinkwrapped together. Recently, the computer box has gotten small again, containing a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM and a behest to buy the hint book, and with a small flap on front so you can open it up and see someone beating the crap out of someone else, just like you will when you buy the game.

Let’s just say that this summary of packaging is a tad brisk. But for all its briskness, you have a running theme: a thing you hold in your hand that then gives you access to something more ethereal (ideas, music, the right combination of set bits in your hardware so it does something involving Pac-Man).

You’ll notice I didn’t discuss the Internet or webpages in any of my examples. That’s because they utterly and totally destroy all of these situations as being the most efficient way to get the central item to you. If you want a book, you can get a 200k textfile and that sucker can be an attachment to an e-mail. In fact, it could be in a PDF format and maintain basically 100% of the formatting, fonts, photos and structure of the original intended pages, and that can be an e-mail attachment. Music is now such a ubiquitously available item that you kind of have to make an effort to avoid it while web browsing. If licensing issues annoy you with MP3, OGG format or FLAC format are hanging around to pick up the slack. An awful lot has changed in the past 10 years, when 56k modem access was the champagne elite for the home user and now people regularly get megabit speeds if they live even vaguely near a city center. People who make books, music and computer software have ranged in reaction from “See You On the Net” to “Hurble Burble la la la la la I hear nothing”. But at a point when nobody, no magazine, newspaper or television show, has to explain what a webpage is and often merely gives a domain name and leaves it at that, you know this Internet thing is pretty much ubiquitous.

People play the “Oh, the Big Bad Media is out to misunderstand us computer users” game, but in point of fact the big bad media uses computers as much as everyone else. We’re set.

So, boxes.

The trend is obviously away from using boxes of cardboard and plastic to pile software up at local stores and carry them home. You’ll still occasionally do it, just like occasionally you buy a black and white TV or take a gas can down to the local station to fill it, but this won’t be the way you generally acquire this “stuff”, and at some point, some big name in software/music will not put a new album out in stores and that’ll be that for really big releases. The only big question is when, and how long before the general populace is trained not to get things the “box” way. Once that happens, the “box” way will be the “old” way and not thought of as how you get the stuff.

Nothing truly goes away, of course. Remember, you can still buy Model T parts, new. But trends are trends, and worth keeping up with.

Especially if, for example, you’re in the process of sinking a lot of money into a movie.

I suspect that GET LAMP will be able to go out in a package, but that ARCADE will not. I might be wrong, but that’s the horse sense I’m getting, observing how things will go. One goes out in a box, the other will likely be distributed online in some fashion.

But since the era of the box isn’t 100% over, I am dedicating a lot of effort into the box for GET LAMP.

There’s a contingency of people who like the aspect of boxes and the artwork/artifacts associated with them. Downloading a piece of software is nice, but they want the original manual and floppies and stuff that came in the box, and will pay dearly for that. Therefore, you can imagine how my friend Trixter felt when the Post Office destroyed a box he bought. It wasn’t that he could download the software program a thousand times over or even get a PDF of the manual; he wanted the material, the artifact. But Trixter, like myself, comes from the time that this was the way commercial products were acquired, so I think that’s a good part of it.

Record albums are a good example: a lot of folks really liked the artwork and design of the packaging of records, but as has been seen in the past 20 years, record labels have had absolutely no hesitation in putting together horrible reissues of old albums, and blowing a massive “IF YOU PIRATE THIS, YOUR BUTT WILL TURN PURPLE AND FALL OFF” warning sticker into the back of a CD, even if it obscures the original art. Even though that’s probably the only thing that defines the work from a .ZIP file, it’s treated like you really need a pile of boxes in your house to be a real consumer. It’s the quality of the box at that point, not the music itself.

The BBS Documentary had a nice box, the nicest I could do, because I knew that’s what people were partially paying for. GET LAMP’s box is going to put the BBS Documentary’s box to shame.

I will likely sell it in two forms, the “standard” box (which will still be nicer than the BBS Documentary box) and a “deluxe/special edition box”, which I am very simply going to have to take pre-orders for, it’ll be so nice. After that, when ARCADE is done somewhere in the 2009-2010 timeframe, I just don’t see these boxes being the way things will be done. So, why not have a really nice send-off?

5 Comments

I get a lot of spam.

I know that’s not exactly breaking news, but sometimes you really have to step back and look at a situation to realize just how entirely horrible things have become. It doesn’t help if you can remember when the situation just wasn’t the same within your lifetime, that you can actually be aware of a time when the problem didn’t exist.

Naturally, unsolicted advertising has been around long before I ever was, both in the manner of flyers, mass mailings, telephone calls from machines or people, and just plain guys showing up at your door. In all of these cases, it at least cost somebody something to harass you, some amount of money, time, maybe even putting them at risk of going bankrupt or not being able to pay bills because they were gambling on enough people responding to the marketing effort to make back what it cost.

Still, even that barrier was actually rather tiny, because you could amortize telemarketer calls, salesman visits, junk mail, using a combination of machines and low-paid people. If you did it right, it wasn’t much risk at all.

Now, however, that’s entirely gone. There is, effectively, no cost. Yes, you have to pay to host a machine somewhere (unless you hack into other machines) and yes, you need to pay for bandwidth (unless you hack into other machines), but even if you’re “legit” enough to have a real machine and pipe you pay for, the per-person cost is insanely low. It costs about the same to mail 10,000 people, a million people, or 100 million people with your haraguing, lying, sex-promising e-mail crap bomb.

There is now a massive range of utilities and organizations dedicated to reducing spam, and as a result people get spam but they may forget how much spam is actually out there. Since I’ve been around a bit, I have my own mail server. This mail server now bounces 1,000,000 spams a week.

Again. BOUNCES. ONE MILLION SPAMS. EVERY WEEK.

That’s the stuff that gets turned away based on a number of criteria. That’s still my mailserver being sent some portion of that mail, analyzing the request, and then making a decision.

After that, there’s probably another 40-50,000 spams that are able to get past that initial set of criteria, enough for my internal spam checkers to do something about them. For each one, a host of tests are done against the letter. Machine resources are spent checking style, links contained within, IP address sending information, and so on. From that, it makes a best guess, and provides a number rating. If the number rating is high enough, it goes into my spam folder and I don’t see it. So this means I merely see 10-20 spams a day.

As a result, and because I can delete this stuff on sight using the same part of my brain that regulates breathing, it’s too easy for me to forget what’s going on. All these many thousands of mails, all these millions of bounced mails, all filling my T-1 line. For nothing.

But, you see, that’s not the only spam I see. Spam, once the province of posts on Usenet or e-mails to unsuspecting victims, has now pervaded everywhere. Examples:

• Referrer Spam. I have thousands (thousands!) of connections to my webserver, trying to hit everything on it, giving me fake referrers to porn or straight spam sights. They fill my log, raise my readership numbers falsely, and make it that much harder for my scripts to analyze the logs.
• Comment Spam. Until I implemented the anti-spam method you encounter when posting message, I was getting 3,000 comment spams a day. Again. three thousand each and every day. You realize why I added this hoop, now. As it stands, I still see the attempts which fail, scrolling my logs unnecessarily.
• Form Spam. A new trend in the past few months; any website I run that has any form whatsoever, is getting bots coming in, hitting every entry field it can, then submitting. It has no idea what that does and where it goes; but it doesn’t care, it can’t hurt. I only get 2-3 of those a day. I’m sure it’ll grow.
• Wiki-Spam. I had a little MoinMoin Wiki way back when; it started to get postings on it from spammers, whose programs would methodically do tiny edits and then wholesale juggling of entries, putting in links to stuff and then reverting the changes so they’d be in the history but the owner/other users wouldn’t care.

I have encountered fake weblogs that suck the text of my weblog down into themselves and then surround it with ads. I see fake websites that link to me randomly. I see postings show up on any place that registration isn’t required, and I have gotten well over 40 spam-related “friend me” messages on that silly myspace account I got a while ago. I even get instant messages from supposed russian supermodels who have decided to bang me silly, as soon as I allow them to join my friends list. (I have resisted the urge to approve these supermodels.)

What I’m getting at is that spam has pervaded all aspects of online life, anyplace where a person could possibly have input. If a person can say something, then someone has figured out how to make a matrix of machines or scripts go in and act enough like a person to get their message in.

The thing is… spam works. Nobody would go through this trouble if it didn’t pay off, and pay off big. And it will continue to pay off big, probably forever. That’s the (not so hidden) secret. I don’t think there’s really a solution to this, considering that fact.

I wish I could now knock out some pithy statement or insight that would solve the spam problem forever. I can’t. I have none. And when I remember how much of my machine resources are being burned away, how much of my electricty bill is probably my poor machine jamming away at this endless golfball-sized-hail of spam mail that comes in every second of every day, it’s just fills me with despair.

Is it any wonder I prefer to spend my time creating content, and hating any form of advertising?

I don’t despair often, but I despair about this.

11 Comments