ASCII by Jason Scott

Required warning: This is about Wikipedia.

It’s been quite a week to be a Wikipedia critic.

The Wikicritic market, previously one of a few concerned voices drowned out by the tidal din of Wiki-love-chants, is now itself flooded with me-toos. I can’t go anywhere without hearing about this “controversy” that is bouncing around places that normally give Wikipedia nothing but a big hug and a pat on the ass.

In case you’ve been missing out on it, the short form is this: a popular editor of Wikipedia was hired by the Wikia company and in doing so revealed that he wasn’t a guy with some college degrees but in fact was a 24-year old kid from Kentucky. This made a lot of people unhappy, and in the ensuing discussions, Jimbo Wales and strongly alleganced Wikipedians have tried to downplay it, mostly because that position’s always worked before. It’s not working as well this time.

That’s the short form, which is not all that accurate. Here’s some elaboration.

• He wasn’t just a popular editor, but in fact was a very active editor on wikipedia, with many, many thousands of edits under his account. And over time, he was not just an editor, having played the World of Wordcraft game that is Wikipedia so well he’d collected most of the “level-ups” you could hope to achieve: Editor, Administrator, Oversight, and Arbitration Committee Member. Some of these are truly difficult bonus rings to grab onto, requiring months or years of careful reputation building, carefully phrased responses to posed questions and clarity of vision when explaining your actions. It’s almost impossible to do without having multiple accounts to siphon off your more base or cruel instincts.
• His false character, wasn’t just “a guy with some college degrees”. In fact, he claimed to be a professor with 4 degrees, including two doctorates. He listed them specifically and in what fields (Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies, Religion, Theology, Canon Law) and indicated that he was teaching classes in this subject. He also implied a degree in life experience, adding 20 years to his age.
• Actually, he didn’t just claim false credentials… he would cite them in arguments and win arguments that way. He would mention having “not heard that in or out of class”, classes he was not running. He called himself “one of Wikipedia’s foremost experts on Catholicism” in the middle of a discussion. And he referenced his Ph.D with this promise: “This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s credibility.”
• It didn’t just make people unhappy; it has been tearing everybody apart. People who have been involved with Wikipedia for years and some of its most vocal supporters have had to hold their noses and try to find a justification for this. People who were indifferent are in many cases absolutely livid, considering what a slap in the face this sudden declaration is and how many years the fiction was maintained. And people like myself, who have spent a little bit of time pointing out the flaws in the system and the potential for abuse, have been grabbing snacks and sitting on the side of the hill while the fireworks get progressively more spectacular.
• Wales and gang are not just trying to downplay it. They have actively told the entire world to go fuck themselves, because it was an internal matter and everyone’s had a strong talking to, and everything’s handled, and please just go back to working on Wikipedia because we’re all here to make an encyclopedia, blah blah, etc. Anyone raising Cain after this declaration is a troublemaker, a troll, and shouldn’t be paid any heed. The issue is closed.
• Finally, it’s well beyond “not working as well this time”. Even people who vaguely know what the hell a “Wiki” really is totally understand the concept of “degree falsification” and how, in the history of such a scandal, the traditional response is to resign or be fired. The fact that Wales’ response was to promote the lying lie-licious liar into one of the single most powerful users on Wikipedia after the story broke is going to get this little story everywhere, and people are getting (justifiably) angry about this, and not just turning to whatever’s next on the Food Network.

Naturally, the not-a-doctor in question, whose pseudonym is “Essjay”, has been going through what I like to call a “Liar Spasm”. This is the set of wild screams, arm flailing, and bug-eyed thousand-yard-stare that accompanies the discovery and unrefutable publicity of a fraud/con artist. It’s quite spectacular to watch (hence the popcorn party for the Wiki-critics). I’ll matrix what’s going on with a couple other recent frauds: the Joyce Hatto plagarised music hoopla, and the James Frey completely-made-up-shit extravaganza.

Here’s how these go.

• Person is universally beloved, lauded for talent, considered a high water-mark.
  • Joyce Hatto: World-renown pianist, capable of playing an incredible range of music from many artists, recorded over 100 CDs, playing despite her affliction with cancer that eventually took her life.
  • James Frey: Author of “A Million Little Pieces” and “My Friend Leonard”, incredibly-selling books telling of personal pain and redemption, quoting amazing stories of his life that seem almost unreal in their depths of sadness and recovery.
  • Essjay: Beloved editor of Wikipedia, doctor of divinity, tens of thousands of edits and mass of contribution to Wikipedia. Lauded so much that his name is recommended to the New Yorker when a piece is written on the Wikipedia phenomenon.
• Something doesn’t quite add up, and people start asking questions.
  • Joyce Hatto: A music lover pops in one of Hatto’s CDs and for some reason, the computer matches it up to a completely different artist’s performance of the same piece.
  • James Frey: The website “The Smoking Gun” decides to get their hands on a couple mugshots of Frey for their mugshots collection, and start finding themselves stymied in tracking down any record of the alleged events.
  • Essjay: Having been hired by the Wikia Foundation, Essjay lists the information on his Wikia page about himself in a way that is utterly incompatible with his previous descriptions of himself.
• The parties begin thrashing insanely trying to cover up what just happened, piling misstatements and untruths that just dig a deeper hole.
  • Joyce Hatto: Her husband/widower claims first that he has no idea how such an amazing coincidence can have happened. After it is shown that there are waveform-perfect matches, he then says that he spliced in other performances from other artists to mask his wife’s screams of pain she suffered during her bout with cancer, recording her pieces..
  • James Frey: First started blocking all access by The Smoking Gun to anyone he could control, then claimed it was all a conspiracy to take him down, then said that some pieces were fabricated to help the story, then claimed on his weblog that the truth would be told and then ultimately fell down into a self-criticizing loop, appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show (where he had benefited hugely from a previous appearance) to be dressed down for a full show by Oprah herself.
  • Essjay: First claims this is all no big deal, and that he only was doing it to protect himself from hate mail and death threats, then apologized profusely “if” anyone was hurt by his actions, then enlisted Jimbo Wales to defend him and say that they’d talked and everything was fine, and now is stonewalling….

Obviously, the story is still unfolding; I’d be surprised if he lasts on Wikipedia for a week before he has to take a “Wikibreak”, or whether he could possibly continue to maintain his position on Wikipedia. But the best part, to me, is that I think he’s still in the middle of a lie. This is critical: I don’t believe for a second that Ryan Jordan is what or who he says he is. He still has made no public appearance at a Wikimania conference, he has made statements about working at a Fortune 20 company that don’t add up, and there is some question as to what his real age and location is. A reasonable person would say “Surely, he can’t still be lying about this sort of stuff, with all this attention, all this going on.” And like I pointed out above, the Liar Spasms take a long time to die. I think we’re nowhere near the end of that.

Now that we have all that out of the way…

First, there’s a few more details to get out there about Essjay’s actions over the past couple of years. First of all, he would wade into articles and subjects that were related to his “degrees”, and he would reference his “degrees”, “students” and “classes” in the process of arguing points or pushing for changes in articles. In other words, he deliberately misled others to think he had credentials he did not. Second, he was interviewed by a magazine (the New Yorker) and allowed this fiction to continue, essentially lying to a reporter’s face (over the phone, of course). Third and most disturbingly, even as all this information was breaking, Jimbo Wales appointed Essjay to the Arbitration Committee, which is basically Wikipedia’s Court of Last Resort, where Wikipedians can be brought before them or bring others before them and they will sign off on whether the actions or events were justifiable/proper under Wikipedia’s rules.

What is going on in all this, and which I am fearful is going to be missed, is how Wikipedia’s Value System functions. “Honor Killings”, “Circumcision”, “Dog Shows”, “Child Soldiers”, “Abortion” … there are thousands of events and values that people engage in every day that are completely inscrutable to a good portion of the rest of the people on the Earth. Sometimes you can see the logic and decide it’s just not your cup of joe, but other times you see things that are allowed in one jurisdiction that would have “those people” turned into organ donors anywhere else.

Wikipedia’s value system is not obvious to “outsiders”, that is, the millions who now browse the articles and don’t do much editing (which is the vast majority of people). But those values are there, and they’re sometimes not as obvious as you think. For example:

• The action of editing or making changes is considered positive, as long as the changes are consistent and not non-sequitur. If you do the same simple change (linking all examples of a word to an article) to a thousand articles, you are considered to have accomplished a lot more than someone who’s made one or two (paragraph-sized, researched) changes to an article.
• Destruction is lauded and cheered as much as construction. If you are able to delete hundreds of articles because you think the people, places or things listed therein are “not notable”, you are lauded for improving the Wikipedia as much or more as someone who adds 10 new articles on subjects previously not covered. In fact, if someone comes along and gets your 10 articles deleted, they are going to be lauded ever more than you were for creating them.
• Jimbo Wales is Law. There are a hundred ways to side-step this and it’s kind of on the same level as going “Do you really think this wafer is the Blood and Body of Christ”, but functionally, there is a high regard held to any statements or declarations that Jimbo Wales makes in a Wikipedia article and with very few exceptions (although not without a little bit of pouting and shouting), His Will Shall Be Done.
• There are Wikipedians and there are Wikipedians. It is possible to be an editor on Wikipedia (well, obviously it’s easy for anybody to be an editor on Wikipedia) but there are shifting thresholds on Wikipedia that, if you fail to achieve, mean you’re kind of a tourist and not really a member of the community in good standing. (I used to keep track of these thresholds but the ruleset of Wikipedia got too big, and I lost track.)
• Discussion is very good. Too much discussion is counterproductive and needs to be halted.
• Nobody Understands Us. People who complain about Wikipedia in any length of time are likely trying to hurt to project and should leave. People who contribute (see above) and yet question what Wikipedia’s goals and problems might be are likely moles and should not be trusted. Newspapers are generally approaching with an agenda and want to find faults. Organizations that question aspects of Wikipedia don’t get it and should be ignored. People who chime in as readers but who are not full-fledged Wikipedians are, as an entire group, trolls and should be ignored.

Once you start to observe things knowing this value system is in place, unusual responses to this situation make more sense. For example, a lot of Wikipedians have come to Essjay’s defense by pointing out that his edits were all good. If he was doing lots of good edits, it doesn’t matter what his credentials were. When Essjay “apologized”, and Jimbo Wales said “I consider the matter closed”, then for a lot of Wikipedians, that’s pretty much all that needs to be done; it was handled In the Family and the Outsiders have no relevance to the discussion. And they should go away.

It’s too easy, when you run into these clashing value systems, to get hung up on the differences between the system and your own. That’s basically what people are doing right now, wondering why this Jimbo guy gets to shut down discussions or marvelling over the tortured lyrical games being played to justify Essjay’s behavior. What I think is in danger of getting lost here, though, is the level of corruption even within the value system.

For example, it is considered very bad in Wikipedia to have multiple accounts, but many people have multiple accounts simply because they can’t keep track of all the subjects they’re editing/watching otherwise. Some use it to split off bad parts of their personalities, while others are literally using it to keep track of a collection of like-minded articles (say, Mathematics) while other accounts are used to do administrative work. Administrators “do it”. Editors “do it”. But if you get caught “doing it”, it’s a bannable offense. It’s Wikipedia’s Sodomy, basically.

Similarly, if you spend enough time hanging around in Wikipedia’s Deletion Review pages (I do not actually recommend this), you will see that the sands shift almost randomly as to what articles are kept and which are deleted. Even though Wikipedia paints itself as the ‘Sum of Human Knowledge”, since the values are that culling out “cruft” is considered good work, people work to gain points of experience trying to get articles deleted as much as added. It’s not the Sum of Human Knowledge. It’s Some Human Knowledge.

None of Wikipedia’s message bases scale, since they were never designed to be used the way they are; where anybody can edit anyone else’s stuff, anyone’s postings, and only the most recent “post” is considered valid, so you’re fighting race conditions that a “real” message base doesn’t have. So, as soon as Slashdot or Metafilter or Fark or any sizeable audience comes to a location on Wikipedia, this free encyclopedia that anyone can edit has to put up nasty banners telling people their votes do not count, and if they came because of a posting somewhere, they should turn around and get the heck out. They’re outsiders, you see, and they don’t understand Wikipedia like the Wikipedians. Shoo.

The Wikipedia that lives inside the heads of people who use it to check a few trivial subjects from work while they’re bored don’t care about these value conflicts, any more than they tend to care about the living conditions of the person who assembled their Wii controllers. It doesn’t make them evil or wrong, just not interested in that aspect of things. Some of us, like myself, are interested in that aspect of things with regard to Wikipedia, and so, when time and energy permits, I study it and its situations because the critical mass it enjoys right now is a unique an amazing opportunity. This latest white-hot spotlight, shining across the badly-formed gears and endless chewing-gum solutions deep in Wikipedia’s mechanism, is an entertaining sideshow, but I don’t let it take my eyes of the ongoing circus within.

Anyway, I’m giving a talk on Wikipedia at notacon. It’ll correlate to this weblog entry a little, but not completely. See you there.

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My cubicle at work is completely bare except for a single quote hung on the wall next to the computer. A lot of people have heard this quote, but I don’t mind being yet another person quoting it, just in case you haven’t.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It’s from a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt in called ‘Citizenship in a Republic: The Man in the Arena”, which he gave in France in 1910. It was given a year after he left the presidency, and after he’d spent about a year on safari, gathering specimens for the Smithsonian institution. Nine years later, he was dead.

The whole speech is very good; it’s just that the whole “Fuck the Critic” idea resonates with everyone who can’t get a lot of shit done for all the nay-sayers. The rest of that particular passage is worth quoting:

“Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”

Take that, critics! Teddy says put up or shut up!

Old Dead Guys: When You’re Tired of Arguing.

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As far as I can tell, I am the world expert on dial-up Bulletin Board Systems.

A statement sandbagged with such hubris has to come with some caveats, of course. Anybody can kick my ass with minutiae about the specific geographically-centered “scenes” they were part of for months or years. Employees of certain BBS-oriented companies can whip out more dirt than I was ever able to dig up, as well as specific dates that aren’t written down anywhere but in the memories of those who were there. But going from “Hey, let’s put some teletypes in downtown Berkeley” to “Synchronet just hit version 3.14a”, I’m probably your go-to guy to get information, either directly from my memory or from the archives I’ve built up.

Remember, the documentary wasn’t just about filming; it was about research. And, of course, there was no “TIme-Life series of the Bulletin Board System” that I could find when I started thinking about a documentary, or really a comprehensive archive to pull from, beyond the grab-bag of crap that textfiles.com represents. So I had my work cut out for me, and it was work. A lot of reading, a lot of e-mails, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of acquiring of other peoples’ collections to create some place I could then use to leapfrog up into working on a filmed documentary. One could argue I was “researching” since my youth, but that was more “observing”. Textfiles.com was up around 1998, and I started seriously doing “research” probably August of 2001. To help this work, I built up some tools to keep track of stuff, tools which became timeline.textfiles.com and software.bbsdocumentary.com. Even with just a few years passed, stuff was decaying from fact to rumor to insinuation to misspoken legend.

I have, lying around, literally thousands of e-mails of discussion with people, 250 hours of videotape footage (and I am still getting that stuff on archive.org, slowly), hundreds of gigabytes of collected digital material, and even audiotapes and flyers that are stacked up/boxed/protected. Believe me, I got The Stuff. The mistake people make is that they looked at the documentary and thought that was all there was, and that I’d intentionally left stuff out or avoided things to, well, I don’t know… exact revenge? Some people thought I was doing it to favor some conspiratorial bias I was intentionally trying to pimpslap the annals of history with. Then again, some people think I’m a federal agent, too, so there you go.

The purposes of a documentary are not in line with the purposes of a researcher and archiver. A documentary wants to put everything it can into a linear narrative. A researcher and archiver wants as complete a history as is feasible to build, from which infinite future narratives can be constructed as needed for purposes as yet unknown. The documentary takes a knife to the history meatloaf and slices out a nice thick juicy slab for you to enjoy, but there’s a lot of meatloaf left untouched. This leads to broken hearts.

I got a lot of broken hearts when I did this film; people who were pissed I didn’t mention them or their favorite BBS or their favorite software or their favorite whatever, some of them gleefully slinging mashed potatoes from their easy chairs while I spent endless nights and days writing letters and making phone calls. In some cases, I did speak to people who were historical figures or experts in a sub-heading that I was researching, and they wanted nothing to do with the project. In other cases, I made arrangements for a future interview, called, and they were gone, either dead or hiding from me (that sounds exaggerative and it isn’t) and only popping back into contact when they ordered a copy of the finished work.

But even if the pet subjects and people were not baked into the final DVD set, the information is still in my archives, the e-mails and essays and collected materials. Some of it is easy to find and some of it is only where I can get at it, but I definitely have a metric ton of it. I don’t intend to throw it to the four winds, shred it or eat it.

I was reminded of this when I was checking Wikipedia to study references to my documentary and how they were handled, and I stumbled on this revision where an IP address basically lifted the entire “script” of the “Compression” episode on the documentary into a semi-coherent narrative. After a handful of wiki-fiddles (adding minor changes to link it into Wikipedia style), someone blands it out so that it’s not about people anymore, and then it’s more wiki-fiddles to the present day. I did a lot of research about the subject of this controversy and was sent a lot of primary source material to get as close to the state of things as I could. Striking a narrative balance was very difficult, and I did a lot of triple checking of facts to get where I did. I also conducted a lot of conversations, either in-person, on-line or on the phone. You know, journalism and research. The fact that someone can stumble onto the (mostly cribbed from my efforts) Wikipedia entry, add a completely unsubstantiated line like “In retrospect, SEA vs. PKWARE was larely a non-issue to most BBS users outside of Fidonet” and walk away unscathed reminds me why I’m such a critic of the enterprise as it stands.

But the fact remains: what I should be doing is providing better access to all that work I dumped years of my life into, far beyond offering a nice DVD and the current offerings on the documentary and textfiles.com sites.

If I was smart, I’d take on an apprentice and just start throwing crap at him until he finally bursts out from under the weight of asshole Master Jason Scott and becomes a huge name in his own right, until one dark stormy night we fight to the death on the rooftops of London. The most likely candidate for this position is Kiel Bryant Hosier. There’s probably others.

What I think makes the most sense in the short term, however, is to use this weblog as a place to put up essays and narratives that didn’t make it into the film, writing, in bits and pieces, the book that a lot of people think I should have written and which, as a grand project, I have no actual energy to write. Putting together a pile of stories and compiled facts, which then will go into the BBS History site I have or into the other collections I’m running… that seems doable.

So expect, over this year, a bunch of essays, jaunty travelogues into BBS history, which will likely go into the mass of information online, get messed up by Wikipedia, quoted by Usenet, and riffed on by a hundred “web forums” asking if anyone remembers the “old days” before everyone else links to a bunch of O RLY GIFs.

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As part of the Wozipedia project, I decided I was going to take advantage of various collected Wozniak speeches and presentations he’s made over the years, letting him speak in his own words instead of paraphrasing him. When left alone (and given lots of time), Wozniak spins amazing yarns.

For reasons I still don’t quite fathom, Kevin Mitnick was tapped to host the “Coast to Coast” radio program, which is normally a lint trap for conspiracy theories and blown-out pseudo-scientific ponderings, in April of 2006. For reasons I entirely fathom, he pulled in a favor and had his buddy Steve Wozniak come on the show and basically be the subject of the show for a couple hours. I had gotten recordings of this, because hey, Wozniak and Mitnick, what could be better.

The first hour has Wozniak sitting in but not really contributing a whole ton as they cover spyware and a few other computer subjects. But the second hour, Mitnick basically puts The Woz in gear and lets him go. And go he does. Woz covers a ton, from childhood, to his high school and college educations, to life at Apple and his thoughts on everything. I decided this .mp3 should really be transcribed.

I’d heard, on and off, about a service called Casting Words that basically utilizes the Amazon.com Mechanical Turk system to get you a field of transcribers who would go through your mp3 and turn it into a couple of useful formats. I decided that one hour of this radio show would be good. They charge by the minute, so the cost after I calculated the length was $29 dollars.

Is that a good price? Well, it is if you’re submitting something useful to your needs that is loaded with information. A lot of presentations and a lot of shows/podcasts are not, in fact, loaded with information. They tend to be speculative, meandering one-sided conversations, poking gingerly at complicated ideas and encouraging you to “look into it”. The desire to pay to have these shows (essentially spoken link blogs) transcribed is pretty low. But to have Wozniak at full clip for 45 minutes turned into an essay? Speaking about something he’s an expert on (his biography)? And considering how much time I’d have spent doing this and then not being able to work on other stuff? Yeah, it was worth it. I’d put it around having a particularly nice meal; not something you’d want to do all the time, but good for special occasions.

Of course, you get it for free. On the casting words site, here it is in HTML. Here it is in Rich Text Format. Here it is in text format.

Here’s a choice paragraph from it:

Transistor radios came out. I think my most valuable thing was my transistor radio. It influenced me. I thought, “Wow they made a device that I can sleep with and hear wonderful music all night long every night. Turn it on and carry it with me.” It was so personal. It was mine. It wasn’t somebody else’s. It wasn’t my parents’ radio. I could listen to it. And I could listen to whatever channel I wanted. I loved that thing. My Dad, he was working for Lockheed. Only the military could sponsor this early transistor companies in Silicon Valley and the early chip making companies because, for the military to launch missiles, they needed low weight and low weight was to put in six transistors on one chip instead of six separate transistors. So that was early it got me an early education to the whole chip thing and I said, “Are they are going to do that so they can make smaller better transistor radios for us people?” and he said, “No, they are going to make it for the military.” I was disappointed. I really really wanted them to be making the best technologies for people at home.

Enjoy the Woz, my treat.

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This week, I had had a pretty cool plan: Go to California, do an interview for GET LAMP, then go to Hawaii for a few days with family. This past Sunday, the day of my flight, I woke up with another kidney stone. Well, I should say I woke up from the extreme pain of a kidney stone, and then had to cancel first the California leg of my trip, and then the Hawaii leg of my trip. This was a bummer.

So if you wonder what I’ve been up to this week, it’s mostly been:

• Sleeping, in pain.
• Writing up the occasional weblog entry, so I keep consistent.
• Reading a lot of books.
• Sitting up for a bit and then deciding that’s a bad idea.

I hate this situation; it feels like living death. I was able to do a little bit of editing at my video editing setup this week, but not for very long, and that’s work that really needs doing (about a dozen GET LAMP interviews have been culled, giving me roughly 400 “clips” to work with so far). I can’t really lift or move anything worth mentioning, I can’t shovel my walk, I can’t clean my garage, and I can’t go to my gym to do the whole self-improvement thing. This is not a situation a personality like mine handles very well.

It’s one of the reasons a lot of suicides piss me off; I could use that labor! I wish there was a craigslist-like situation for suicidals, where they could come work for me as interns before offing themselves:

College graduate out of bad relationship, 60wpm, planned overdose in 14 days over unreturned phone calls from girl of dreams; available M-F, require 2-3 hours per day for aimless ranting/crying.

I used to be a temp myself; I know how to work around specific employee issues. Additionally, if someone complains about the quality of the job, I can always say “Yes… that person felt the same way… and now they’re gone.”

My Suicide Workforce would be especially good at these projects of mine that have been taking a significant amount of turnaround to finish, like categorizing contributed textfiles or scanning in the pile of printouts near my desk. As it is, I need to do a lot of prioritization, and that can sometimes lead to odd lost afternoons of going deep into rescuing a file from the briny blue that people might not care either way about. I mean, someone will likely care eventually, but sometimes it’s weird which direction I go into, like when I added gigabytes of handgun manuals. Way to save computer history, Jason! On the other hand, it would probably be a bad idea having one of my suicide temps working on that project…

The pain index this time around has been handled nicely, between proper dosages of painkillers and not going through the Emergency Room to get things done. Instead, I actually went to my primary doctor (Dr. Feelgood) and actually got a scheduled scan and medicines and otherwise have spent the time in my own bed with my own stuff and my laptop, so I’m not sitting far away in a scary room cut off from my stuff. So I’ll give this entire go-around a “thumbs up” except for the whole not-going-to-Hawaii thing. I’ll get you next time, Hawaii!

Update: Hey, it got out! click here if you’re all hot to see what one of these little bastards looks like.

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Last year, I got a sudden burst of referrer links to my Great Failure of Wikipedia speech. In fact, the links were all variant amounts of criticial attacks, some strong-willed, others mis-informed. I started to respond to a few until I realized that they were doing it for a class, a class in Blogging, actually.

As it turned out, the class was being held within a couple hours of my house, so I called the teacher and asked if I could show up to that evening’s class and talk about my speech. He accepted.

The whole dynamic of this is probably worth going into; here people were just posting stuff according to the class’s requirements, writing their dashed-off thoughts on a speech, and suddenly the asshole who gave the presentation is there in class. I wish I knew what went through their minds about that.

Well, obviously I know what some of them thought about it, because they weblogged it (blogging class, right?) one of them even decided to speculate on her weblog about my lack of a date for the prom and got a response from me disputing her guesses. Her helpful response? Delete the entire weblog entry. Luckily, there’s such a thing as a browser cache, so I saved her entry for posterity. Isn’t the client-server model great? The best part is that she’s a schoolteacher; great lesson there for your students!

Luckily, I followed my own rule of never speaking in public without having a digital recorder going, and I have the entire exchange recorded to MP3. It made it a lot easier to refute someone saying ‘He interrupted people” to go “Well, I have the tape, and that never happened.”

It was a great time (for me, anyway). I think it’s a case that as I get older, the face-to-face dynamic is becoming just as enjoyable as the online one, and brings different joys. During my “face-to-face” time, however, an exchange happened that shows my (perhaps overly cynical) take on things. Let’s throw that out there.

The teacher was also, when not teaching a class on blogging, a radio show host. There’s an exchange in there where we were discussing using Wikipedia, and he mentioned using it on his radio show during breaks to be able to look up something quickly. After all, he said “My job as a radio show host is to inform my audience.”

No, I said. Your job as a radio show host is to keep your audience listening steadily through a number of commercials and keep their numbers large enough to allow your station to charge more for those commercials.

Maybe people know this, and maybe they don’t; I see a lot of different reactions from people that imply that they don’t. The purpose of a television channel is to make you watch that channel’s advertisements. The purpose of a newspaper is to make you read the advertisements. The purpose of a radio talk show host is to keep you listening long enough to hear the advertisements.

This is a critical thing to understand if you’re listening to, say, a show in which there is “controversy”. Media that is commercially driven has no incentive to end controversy. If it is required to do horrible, illogical things to maintain that controversy, it will do so. If two sides came to an “agreement” at the end, and could see each other’s side, why would you keep listening? There’s no sparks, no attacks.

When watching entertainment, the entertainment’s job is to keep you satisfied long enough to have thought you got a good deal. If you are seeing the entertainment for free, then that entertainment is likely doing “stuff” to ensure its existence; either selling commercial time, or gearing the activities into a direction of worth for a commercial entity. (Product placement comes to mind, but there’s also Opinion placement and other “placements” in effect).

You are, essentially, Fuel that is driving an engine, an engine that has no interest in stopping. To maintain you as fuel, it needs to keep your interest. Keeping someone’s interest is not the same as working in their interest. Once this understanding is clear, you can save a lot of time: of course this talk show host is going to be skeptical and stupid about internet technology! Of course this interviewer is going to ask unfair questions to get a rise out of the interviewee, or, ask insane softball questions to get the interviewee (who you can’t help but look at because they’re famous or beautiful) to sit there longer so the audience will stay around longer. Holy crap! We’re all fuel!

There is nothing wrong with being fuel! Just don’t act all surprised when you’re treated as such.

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Sometime in my later teens, after being raised on the “mean streets” of Bulletin Board Systems, ASCII Express lines, and the occasional Diversi-Dial, I got myself onto the Usenet posting boards. It was stunning to me, because I didn’t know people could write online like that.

For a quick comparison of what I’m talking about, take this message base from the South Pole BBS in roughly Winter of 1984.. and see the difference in this random discussion on a Usenet board in 1988 about getting a Commodore 64 to read Apple II disks. Or, if you feel a need to be more organic, here’s a discussion about the importance of honesty in a relationship, also from 1988.

The difference could be staggering; you had full paragraphs, full ideas laid out, almost essays in form. Spelling was many times better, not to mention grammar and the general thesis being put forward. My initial reaction, which I’m sure wasn’t unique, was wow, these are all the smart people.

And without a doubt, you’re seeing pedigrees of university education in these messages, with youth generally teeming on the side of the BBS messages I posted. But I’m starting to think it’s a little more than that.

With BBSes, you had a very strict time limit; in many cases, you were given less than an hour a day, possibly as little as 20 minutes, to read all the new messages and post any responses, much less play some door games or download files. So time was of the essence. Without a doubt, the introduction of QWK packets, multi-line BBSes and other factors changed this time limitation, but it was there. With Usenet, you were posting locally, always able to read at your leisure, able to post at same, and when you put something out, it would warn you of the weight of your words.

Actually, that little factoid might be forgotten; it used to be when you used a Usenet client, it would often print a message warning you about consequences of your action. The message would read something like this:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]

That’s the warning that the rn (readnews) Usenet news client would print before you could post to a large group; I’m sure other clients had similar warnings. Were it the case that modern posting clients had warnings like this!

This livejournal entry you’re writing, where you describe in excruciating detail how poorly your ex-boyfriend performed in bed, will be not only world-readable and publically commentable, but will cause your name to show up in search engines when people look for a combination of your first name and “rotten lay”. Please be sure you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]

We’re now living in a wealth of community posting interfaces; certainly forums and “BBS-like” software have to be some of the most recreated-from-scratch programming in existence. Everyone wants a shot at making it, and they all bring entirely different goals to the table. As a result, some places consider good conversation the vital spine that links their website together, while others consider it a quaint afterthought, enabling a little more “sticky time” by forcing people to re-check if anyone else also posted.

Even this weblog has the posting software provided by SixApart, who make Moveable Type. It’s pretty basic stuff, letting you post a few easy lines before the window starts to scroll and you kind of lose track of what you were saying in the beginning. One solution is to write stuff out elsewhere, like Notepad or VI, and then copy and paste your completed thought into my anemic little form. In other words, a hack. Right now, ASCII has its little group of posters (Flack, Leah, Shii, Stacia, hello) who live within this particular confined user interface and work with it, but the style of the overriding thing is somewhat dependent on how posting is “treated” by the site.

…here’s where I’m going with this. If you browse around, different websites treat user postings differently. And it feels like some of the interfaces appeal to a certain aspect of people while shutting out others. In other words, the interface is driving the conversation.

Let me show an example. The excellent comic XKCD mentions the issue with Youtube postings, but he’s quite on the mark. Take, for example, this Noam Chomsky video. Chomsky’s a divisive character, able to cause people to take sides. But look at the structure and style of postings this commentary gets:

hughtub:
a REAL educational system might do wonders.
The Framers, nor the ancient Greeks, EVER thought that an ignorant populace could govern itself successfully.
[We’ve proven them right.]
*** Why do you THINK the neocons have gutted education and funds for education?
[Hint: It IS a way to get a controllable, malleable, knee-jerk populace that’ll put up with the “Patriot” Act and other measures to castrate liberty and give up all of our hopes.
It’s working.]

This individual may or may not be making a useful point regarding the quality of education towards creating a proper citizenry of a republic, but if they are, it’s lost in a hash-stew of e.e. cummings-like poetry, bizarre (and short) shifts in logic, and the as-yet-unexplained use of three asterisks to mean… a paragraph break?

In the case of the community called MetaFilter, let’s go with another article about Chomsky, in this case a two sentence link to a bunch of letters about an interview in the UK Guardian. There are still postings with no capital letters, or punctuation, but then a weird thing happens: the longer the conversation goes on, the “smarter” it gets… although a lot of this is because a guy named “russilwvong” grabs the conversation by the sack and starts steering things. In the case of the metafilter interface, pretty much all the posts are on one page (you can look back and forth to them), you are given an account primarily aimed towards posting text, and it’s possible to reference individual comments in the thread by a URL (like http://www.metafilter.com/46414/Chomsky#1096166 or similar).

I could eat your day/evening up going from community to community and comparing how they handle this aspect of things, but what I’m essentially describing is this:

• Forum and user interaction is often considered to be an afterthought.
• Since it’s the most-quickly-modifiable aspect of a site, it ends up being the most vital and reflective of the site.
• The User Interface (including the treatment of postings, the ease of browsing older postings, and the ability to make new postings in an easy refined manner) has a majority percentage effect on most forums’ quality.
• We appear to be doomed as an online race to re-learning all this over and over until another Usenet-like messaging standard makes an appearance.
• I’m sure Danah Boyd has covered this to some extent in front of multiple rooms of people for years on end.

Could it be, I’m asking here, a case that some of these places that have absolutely atrocious forums (like YouTube) should consider the design of their most dynamic and representative component more important? That maybe they should look at what makes one website seem jam-packed full of Smarties and the other packed full of Dumbells? While it’s fun to say “Well, that’s just the sort of people who would be interested in that website.”, I think it’s a cop-out. I think there’s a science here, a skillset that could stand to be expanded. The working real-life examples are there. I just wish they were used more.

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What I think has impressed me the most over the years I’ve worked with computers are the times I’ve come to an expectation that a computer acts a “certain way”… and then along comes a programmer, hacker or tinkerer who proves that no, in fact you’re wrong and it doesn’t have to be that “certain way”.

One of these situations was floppy disk load times. Having come from cassette tapes, where it could literally be 20-30 minutes of load time before the program was ready to go, Floppy Disks were by far both superior and blindingly fast. But people are what they are, and it never takes that long for the mind to adapt to the increased speed and then find fault with it. In the case of disks, it could be anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds to load a program via floppy, depending on what was going by.

I didn’t own an Apple II at the time, but the Apple II was what the schools dealt in and that’s what the kids would trade programs in. If you were lucky, your school had kids who had access to programs/copies of disks outside of the district, and then you’d have even more cool stuff. It also gave whoever had these new programs the pride of showing off their latest wares. (Softwares. Wares. Warez. I’m sure you get the etymology of this by now.)

Again, the way that programs (especially commerical programs) being traded around “worked” is that you’d put the floppy disk into the drive, then power on the machine, and then let it “boot” into the program, taking about 15 seconds to do so, chugging away, and then it’d show a graphic splash screen and there we were. This was the “certain way” that floppy disks on the Apple II would boot.

However, that changed for me when I ran into “Beautiful Boot” by the Midwest Pirates’ Guild.

You never forget your first time, or more accurately you occasionally do forget your first time if it’s the first time encountering a file selection menu. But I remember mine clearly. I was in a computer classroom at school, and there was a movable cart with a large (regular) television serving as a monitor at the front of the room, and someone shoved in their latest “wares’ disk to show off what they had. They turned on the Apple II, and in one click of the disk drive, there it was:

The screenshot shows several things clearly and a few things not as clearly. First of all, the font was great: instead of the basic Apple II font, this was an easy-to-read style that could been seen across the room. The selections were all right there, waiting for you to type in a letter instead of the commands BRUN STOLEN.PROGRAM.I.DOWNLOADED or RUN “CRAPPY BASIC PROGRAM”. And the minute you did, off they would go, chugging away quickly and your program would be up in no time.

Additionally, it had a soundtrack, albeit a simple one: plinky little dots of noise, not unlike the starfield that was scrolling in the background, which was also amazing to watch… all of this in one disk chug! How did this happen? It was basically magic.

This was a quantum leap from anything I’d seen before. I got a copy of the disk that had this menu on it, but it was years before I got my hands on the actual program to generate this menu. The documentation for Beautiful Boot is here in my archives, and you can see the excellent work done on this program’s instructions to make it easy to use.

Here’s screenshots from the generation program (called Beautiful Boot, of course):

So, how did Beautiful Boot boot so quickly? Well, by simply working hard at the programming, of course: being on Track 0, it highly compressed the program that would do the actual menu, and had a very reduced version of AppleDOS that could fit in that track. One click, one read, one run. And so in doing this, they proved everything could be improved about the Apple Boot process.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mini Appler (and Sinbad Sailor) of the Midwest Pirate’s Guild as part of the BBS Documentary. When the opportunity came up to interview them, you can bet I was going to move heaven and earth to make such an interview happen. As it was, it only took a round-trip by car across Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota, a few extra hours on an insane trip that will always be thought of as the “Midwest Run”. (I went to 8 states in 10 days, driving thousands of miles and doing well over a dozen interviews).

Here’s the Mini Appler (get it? Minneapolis?) from one of the photographs I took during that interview.

What a great guy he was; photogenic, articulate, and with a good memory for the BBS days. Naturally we discussed Beautiful Boot, where he told me how he’d gotten the starfield routine from a Broderbund game of the same time (he’d lifted the assembly routines, then changed them from side-scrolling to vertical scrolling). It was great to finally, ultimately, thank him for blowing my mind a mere 20 years earlier.

This magical situation, where a well-written program does something that nobody previously thought was possible, has only happened to me a few times in my life (most recently would be the 8088 Corruption demo that Trixter did in 2004). When they happen, you have to treasure them, and they remind me how everything is possible, and cynicism gets me nothing but a slow load time.

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That Demo Party I’m co-organizing for April, Blockparty, now has the speakers list finalized. These are people who are speaking specifically about demoscene and scene-related topics, as well as the dozens of others speaking at the hosting conference, Notacon. Here are my own personal takes on the speakers; the speakers page has more generalized information and biographies.

Andy “Phoenix” Voss: Allow Me To Demonstrate

To start off, we snagged Andy Voss, who’s better known as Phoenix of the group Hornet. Hornet is sort of a dormant group these days (they refer to themselves as “ex-members” occasionally) but during the early 1990s these guys quickly established themselves as the go-to-group for keeping track of the latest and greatest on PC Demos, and demo music. The “Hornet MOD Archive”, for example, was just an amazing piece of work, and if you were a musician (and I sort of was), you weren’t anything until you get your music on there and it got rated by the staff. Andy is considered to be one of the top experts on the history and knowledge of the demoscene in North America, so it made sense to ask him to speak about the subject and provide an introduction to the whole idea of why we would have a party like this.

Jim “Trixter” Leonard: 8088 Corruption

Trixter’s become one of my best friends over the past few years; in the Jason Scott League of Extraordinary Compulsive Disorders he’s known simply as the Eye of Doom. The reason for this is that I can drop a montage of video in his inbox, and he will respond with feedback like “It appears you changed the framerate of the second shot, and your autofocus kicks in at 00:32:22.” His eye for detail and his wide-ranging audio, video and archiving skills make him the most Jason Scott-like person in the planet. Surprisingly, we still get along.

Jim’s talents with programming and his incredible eye led to a demo called “8088 Corruption”, the details of which are over here. Basically, he got full-motion video and audio on an original IBM PC. I’m not making this up, and I’m not exaggerating. Obviously, this got a lot of attention, won awards, and was one of the big mind-blowers of the previous few years. At Blockparty he’ll be bringing the original hardware he ran this demo on, and explaining how he put it all together. And maybe even a surprise or two. (He’s got an eye for surprises.)

Andrew “Necros” Sega: Taking Tracking Mainstream

I’ll just explain why Necros is in this speaker list from the most memorable experience I had regarding him. Back in 1996, I had the pleasure of attending the North American International Demoparty, also known as NAID. He was giving a presentation on “tracking”, which is basically the use of a computer program to make music, using samples and programmatic references to samples to generate songs. This is how I used to make music in the early 1990s and so did a ton of other people. But Necros was considered to be one of the greats, and I stood in the back of the presentation hall to listen to him speak.

At one point, he said “Let’s say we have a baseline here…” and he just hacked in a bunch of numbers, as quickly as if you were typing your own phone number three times. When he was done, he hit PLAY on the program, and a perfectly formed, well-done, intense bass-line was playing. The effect on the room was instantaneous; hushed, amazed silence. If this doesn’t sound impressive, imagine a guy giving you some tips about drawing portraits and he talks to you about using proper pen technique, looking at you, and his hands idly sketch out a perfect rendering of your face. It was just friggin’ amazing, and I still remember that 11 years on. Andy has since gone into professional music creation, and it’s going to be quite the presentation.

Christian “RaD Man” Wirth: Building Character: ANSI from the Ground Up

My man, my buddy, my close friend Rad Man, co-organizer of the Blockparty, will be presenting a primer on the idea of ANSI and the creation of ANSI artworks. He’s given speeches on the “Artscene” and on running an Art Group, but this is more focused on showing how to work in the medium, because the problems and solutions that came up in ANSI art creation are in many ways similar to problems that exist and have always existed when you want to express yourself creatively with a limited medium. Since he’s in town anyway, it made sense for him to flex his knowledge and skills in this direction, so he’ll be giving a presentation as well. It’ll be great.

We’ve been kicking around the idea of making a “mini-doc” about Artscene History, using his built-up presentation he’s been giving the last couple years. There’s always something new for us to work on.

David “Polaris” Valentine
Beausoleil “BuZ” Samson-Guillemette: Techniques for 4kb Intro Development

Northern Dragons are currently the most active and premier Demoscene group in North America, so of course we’d be quite amiss if we didn’t have representation from these fellows at the event. So, both the founder and one of the members of ND will be presenting at the event, and hopefully entering some of the competitions as well. In this presentation, they’ll be talking about 4k demos, which are what they sound like; entire graphics and sound productions that are taking up a total of 4096 bytes. If that sounds insane, that’s what the demoscene is all about! Insanity, rubber ducks and blowing your mind. These guys are also doing the invitation demo for this party, which will be coming out at the end of the month.

Nullsleep: Squarewave to Heaven: An introduction to the Chiptune Music Scene

What self-respecting demo party could pull itself off without a representation of the currently-hot 8-bit scene? Nullsleep and I have been interacting on and off for years now, since we both remix old stuff into new, and spend time tracking down both old examples of cool stuff and finding new contexts to put them in.

If you’ve not heard of “Chiptune” music or the “8-bit scene”, then let me send you over to 8-bit Peoples and take a shark-bite out of your productive workday. A lot of this also shows up in a documentary that is making the rounds as we speak. Again, you’re in for a treat.

I know how it is for people when they’re planning trips; they usually wait a couple of months before the event to even start thinking about scheduling or arranging things. Well, now is the time. This is going to be a great party, at a great con, and I’m going to personally ensure you have a fantastic time. Get over to the Registration Page and sign up!

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I know people are probably wondering how that whole replace a popular image with a less popular one experiment has been going. While I doubt I’ll be doing many more “updates” unless something really cool or interesting happens in the future, I might as well give some hard statistics for the people who were wondering what the addition of Goatse did to dissuade users on Myspace from using the art.

Well, I’m happy to report that only a mere 18,000 people were goatse’d in the month of February, plus another 3,000 who saw it in conjunction with the article on here.

So wait, you’re saying, people still haven’t gotten rid of the grim reaper picture on their pages? Still?

No, in fact a good amount of them have done something worse.

Many of them now have their backgrounds set up to download the grim reaper pic, then immediately download a black background and overlay it over the picture.

As hard as I may try sometimes, you just can’t make this stuff up.

You win this round, clueless Internet Passengers!

A few of the kids have simply shifted from the Grim Reaper image over to the other cool images in that directory, so it does mean they took the time to really browse around and find something else to hotlink to. I thought that was nice.

I suspect I’ll just quietly kill hotlinking for artscene.textfiles.com, since it’s just causing too much trouble bandwidth-wise, but not quite yet. I thought it ironic that while writing the Peter Hirschberg entry I posted recently, I ended up having to make local copies of all his stuff because… his server forbids hotlinking. That’ll show me.

Anyway, onwards to real content tomorrow. I take requests, by the way.

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