ASCII by Jason Scott

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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In case you’re wondering, I do actually get fan mail, non-ironically, thanking me for the various projects I’ve done. I get hate mail too, but the fan-mail outnumbers it 20 to 1. So what I’m really saying is: Get cracking, you bastards.

In recent years, however, I’ve been receiving a type of fan mail I didn’t expect to get, but I should have. It reads, in various forms, this way.

“Thank you for being such an important part of my growing up.”

TEXTFILES.COM was founded in 1998. (October 8, 1998, actually). This means that it’s starting to edge towards 9 years old. It also means that it’s been possible for a kid to get online (let’s say, when they’re age 11 or 12), stumble upon the website, and then read it, off and on, until they’re in college. Since a lot of these files were written by kids between those ages, that means we have a case of a generation of teenagers leaving essays and thoughts to the next succeeding generation of teenagers, through my site.

I guess if you stick around long enough, you become an institution. The mail that comes now doesn’t have the tone of “good luck with your project”, but “I hope you can wish me well on my project.” Instead of “Where did you get these”, it’s “Thanks for having these.” In a few uninformed cases, I’ve actually gotten ‘Thanks for writing all these.”

Speaking of writing these…

When I put textfiles.com together, it was meant to simply be a collection of files that I knew people had worked hard on or which I was worried were going to disappear, even though they’d played a big part in my own youth. I figured I’d gone through all that trouble back then of saving them onto floppies and printouts, so I might as well put them online. That was 1998. Later, I realized that a few “BBS textfile-like” files were showing up, but I didn’t want them to end up being in the same place as the BBS textfiles themselves, so I created web.textfiles.com, which handles all the files made after 1995.

But an interesting thing happened. People started contributing new files to me directly.

And I don’t mean that they starting finding old BBS textfiles I didn’t have and sending them to me, although that did happen. I mean that people started writing new files in the style of BBS textfiles and then contributing them to me, directly, to be joined with the textfiles.com collection and “keep it going” even though there weren’t the same sort of dial-up BBSes to upload to.

Not wanting to shove them into web.textfiles.com, I created a directory, uploads, and started saving them in there, so they’d be a part of “the collection” without being relegated to “something I happened to find on the web”.

And here we are now, with over 550 files sent to me over the last 8 years. Quite a lot!

There’s a few people in there who have been contributing files to me for half a decade. I’ve actually watched their writing styles change, their focus and priorities shift, and in some cases, they disavow and hate previous works. It’s kind of fun to watch this progression in others; I certainly recognize that in my own works and growth.

So what’s it feel like to be an institution? Like I shouldn’t waste too much time in front of the TV, actually, and get myself in gear. High gear. I have to do it for the fans!

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I’ve bitched out a few people who’ve tried to get me to “endorse” their little messy get-rich-quick schemes, especially when they do so in a way that shows they neither know me, care to, or even tried to understand why I do what I do and work with that.

Finally, I got a letter that succeeds! So here we go:

Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2007 18:59:46 +0000
From: Bogart DeJoint 
To: Jason Scott 
Subject: Uncle Bogart wants YOU...

...to join the Free Internet!

We crazy mofos at the FreeNIC (freenic.org) have started an alternate DNS
root for non-commercial sites. In a nutshell, that means no ads, no spam,
and no fees for being listed in our top-level domain (.free). We want to
bring back the anti-corporate spirit of the BBS age, to return to a way
of life where Internet users are not viewed simply as consumers to be
exploited for financial gain.

Now, normally we wait for people to come to us and say "I want my free
domain. Bitch best recognize." But in this case, we think your site would
be such a tremendous asset (not to be confused with a tremendous asshole)
to the project that we're making this request the other way around.
Really, we're nothing like those 247 WhoreMedia douchebags. Nobody is
trying to profit off your work. We hate profit. We just see that
textfiles.com provides enormous amounts of interesting content without a
single ad, and that's exactly we're looking for on the Free Internet.

All we'd like is to point a .free domain (be it textfiles.free or any
other domain/s of your choice) to the textfiles.com servers, and then for
you to post something on your weblog along the lines of "I'm on the [Free
Internet] (linky-linky to freenic.org) at textfiles.free, and wouldn't it
kick ass if more people joined us. It's free as in freedom *and* as in
free weed!" Now that you're on a six entry a week schedule, surely there
are slow news days where you can fit in this kind of stuff? Surely an
Internet root that says "fuck the corporate world, biaatch!" deserves a
mention on your weblog?

Well, there you have it, that's the pitch. With your help, the Free
Internet can get past the concept stage and on to the "free porn" stage.
We have an IRC server at irc.freenic.org, where we answer serious
questions (#free) or generally monkey-ass around while getting high
(#hash). If you dropped by, you'd at least get some free virtual pizza.
With pot. Which you know would totally own, so come on, help us take back
the Internet! NOOCH!

w3rd, I'm out.

What wins here:

• Humor.
• No attempt to get me to put “ads” up on textfiles.com.
• No attempt to make it sound like they’re doing me a “favor” instead of the other way around.
• Profanity. (See: Humor)
• Drug references. I don’t do drugs but I do do drug humor. (See: Humor)

So there you go, there’s this alternative NIC thing running which is apparently run by toked-out hippies using their nameservers as a bong but also giving you essentially free DNS for your trouble. If this attracts you, go for it. Otherwise, relax; smoke some of this.

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If you haven’t been following the accomplishments and style of Peter Hirschberg for the last decade or so, let me repair that major mistake immediately.

He is a true modern renaissance man, combining art, programming, and industrial design. His style is impeccable and pervades all his work, and at various times he has lit up my online life with his craft and creation. I have not had the pleasure of communicating with him or meeting him in person, and one day I hope to rectify that.

Hirschberg’s big effect on me is being inspiring in the realms of emulation, arcades, and style. Let’s cover them.

At some point I had considered doing some sort of book or similar project around Emulation, specifically Arcade Game Emulation, because the whole subject fascinates me. In point of fact the Arcade Documentary will be covering emulation and I have a number of interviews with emulation program authors sketched out or planned. Emulation as a concept and technique actually goes back many years, but the “mainstreaming” of arcade game emulation occured in the 1990s, with machines powerful enough to emulate arcade games from years before without stuttering or freaking out. It’s a little hard to believe that this would now be old history, but it’s getting on 10 years for some of the events. One of the facts that’s starting to get obscured is that before MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) basically flattened the market, there were a bunch of single-game or small-group-of-games emulators out there. A emulator might just do Dig Dug II, or Pac-Man, or a small collection of Midway games that happened to use the same chip. During this time, Hirschberg released a multi-game emulator called Vector Dream. The link I just gave has a lot of information about the program, but I’ll put out my own thoughts on top of them.

When emulator authors were putting out their works, they tended to focus on the basics. The programs would be command-line or have a simple enough GUI, and then you’d be playing the game. The cool part was that they worked, and worked quickly. This was quite sufficient for a first wave of “Holy Shit It Works” which is what was basically going on. at the time.

However, Vector Dream upped the bar. And by upped the bar I mean that our instruments were last able to track the bar going past Saturn before we lost contact with it. Where previous emulators had been comparing each other based on framerate/speed of the emulator and accuracy of the sound generation, Hirschberg’s Vector Dream attempted to give you control over aspects of the arcade experience you didn’t even know were a part of it. The vectors, previously quite happy in an emulator to be drawn accurately, could now be translucent. They could show a glow radius. The sound was accurate, but he added an optional mixed-in sound of the deflection coil. Of the power supply. When you dropped in a “quarter”, you heard it go in. You saw the start buttons blinking. Little things, you may say. Minor additions. But it was a level of craft not seen before.

Hirschberg maintained Vector Dream for a while, then pulled it down when he started working on the relatively-shortlived Retrocade” project, which was meant to be the be-all end-all of emulators. It was like a supergroup of emulator authors, and was an attempt to follow many of the credoes and ideas we’d seen in Vector Dreams. Like Vector Dream, Retrocade was stylish, accurate, and filling with nice touches. Both Vector Dream and Retrocade have backgrounds for the video games that used the “45 degree glass” trick to give black-and-white games some implied color. It had Hirschberg’s style all over it.

MAME, the current dominant arcade emulator, uses a lot of these ideas, and is very well maintained, adding new games or game variants every few weeks. It also utilizes digitzed sounds, backgrounds, and even scans of control panels and marquees to give you more of the flavor of the place they came from.

Peter Hirschberg, meanwhile, got quiet as far as fans like myself were concerned, but I always kept an eye out for him. A number of years back, he released the beautiful and stylish LEDHEAD, which simulates the old Mattel handheld LED games like Football, Baseball and the like. When I play these, I’m playing with this thing, I’m immediately transported back to hanging out at my dad’s house on visitation, playing LED football while resting against his shoulder as he watched TV. This was about the time that he was quite happy to have his kids around, and if that meant the son was going to be banging away at the dumb little piece of plastic, fine with him. I loved that thing, and this simulator captures it perfectly.

His other simulators will get your attention too, like Vertisim, which simulates a helicopter toy from the 70s, and Adventure: Revisited where he dragged Adventure kicking and screaming into the modern day. Just his description of the process is worth the price of admission.

Am I indicating how much I respect this fellow? I see his name, and I endorse the result immediately.

I was pleased, therefore, to find out that the arcade documentary “Chasing Ghosts” had Hirschberg on as a consultant and artist. This is the fellow you want on your team when you’re going for the extra mile, and all reports I have seen (I have not had the pleasure of seeing this film yet) indicate that the artwork and animation is impeccable. Additionally, there was a bonus to this, worth noting because it will fade very quickly into history.

You see, when you’re trying to get attention and attendance and possible buyers for your as-yet-unsigned film, you will often do a Dog and Pony show to attract all these potential folks. I don’t like that people have to do this, but I can certainly respect the quality of the Dog and Pony show, and the amount of effort some will put into them.

To that end, Hirschberg has put up an excellent scrapbook of the “Chasing Ghosts Arcade” which was created near the Sundance festival to attract people. In there, you had all sorts of classic machines, the design of said arcade being the result of Hirschberg’s skill, including a new poster and artwork referencing this “Arcade”.

As my friend Trixter commented, “But what happened to it?” And the answer is, of course, that it was all torn down and scattered to the four winds; that’s what you do with publicity stunts.

But fear not.

Outside his own home, Hirschberg has basically built his own arcade… filled with the games he owns, and having all those touches of craft and wonder I have come to expect from him over the last decade.

Tell me, when you see this photo, that you can tell it’s in someone’s home:

You can see what I mean by craft here. The galaxy rug, glowing under blacklight. The raised wooden railing separating some of the games. The checkerboard floor. The change machine, the little signs, the scattered arrangement. This is mastery.

Were the world filled with more Peter Hirschbergs, we’d be dumping all our money into medical research to ensure we lived to see all the great works they made.

Will he sit down for an interview for my own arcade documentary? Maybe.. I hope so. Maybe this year, maybe next year. But either way, he’s inspired me more than almost anyone to capture that feeling on film.

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So here we are, roughly 40 weblog entries into 2007, and I might as well take a moment or two to go meta-critical and describe what’s going on.

This is the year of discipline for me. Whereas before I’ve slacked off or otherwise misdirected energy and avoided certain necessary things, this is the year I finally follow my own advice and either admit I’m never going to do something and move on, or do it.

The weblog shifted from 5-10 entries a month to roughly 24. (Six times a week.) In other words, I’ve either doubled or quadrupled the output, and turned this weblog from an occasional bit of musing to a consistently updated flow of thought. This has the potential to lead to either dilution (my 5 good thoughts a month are now smeared like peanut butter across 24 entries) or excess (people find that they simply can’t take that much Jason Scott in a single month).

Obviously, I wish for neither of these potentials to be achieved, so I hope to include a mix of what I think people enjoy (theoretical essays, travelogues, filming diary, meta-discussion, highly-recommended links) while trying to avoid what I think are major pitfalls (content-less posting of links, lowering the bar of “weblog worthy” to noise levels, being not funny). We’ll see how the mix goes and I encourage people to feed back, because I really do occasionally listen.

I personally don’t think that having a single reason to do something is adequate for a long-term commitment to a project, the outcome being that your brain/personality can then devote time to overcoming that problematic “reason” until you’re convinced you don’t really need to do it anymore.

I had three reasons to do the documentary: 1. I really did believe I was saving important history and information for posterity, getting stories and interviews that were in danger of being lost. 2. I could actually meet people who were heroes or legends from my youth, personally, and hang out with them. 3. I could make a cool film and maybe sell it. By leveraging these different reasons on different days, I could avoid shelving or delaying the project because “the reason” wasn’t grabbing me anymore. And trust me, there were a few times this came in handy: during multi-hundred-mile drives resulting in a minute of usable footage, or the multiple times I was barred entry because a spouse spontaneously decided This Was All A Bad Idea. By simply concentrating on the other reasons that this latest fiasco or painful process didn’t change, I could slog through.

Similarly, I have multiple reasons to step this whole weblog thing up. One is that it increases readership by being frequent, and a readership means better feedback, more interest in my projects, and more contact with folks who can help those projects. Another is that I sometimes overcompensate for not having adequate opportunities to express myself and 24 essays/entries a month oughta calm that issue down. And finally, I realized I needed to start training myself to write more frequently and understandably because it’s just about time to finish some book/writing ideas I have or admit I’m never ever going to do them.

I had a great mentor, name of Clive Smith, who did nothing but give me incredible life advice throughout my late 20’s. The relevant phrase here, which he passed to me during one of our many phone conversations was “Work is Fractal”. Often, the more you work, the more you find an increase in your ability to do work. Part of this, I think, is because you build up skills at things like referencing information or composing replies, and you can eventually jump into tasks with all the cylinders going at full instead of painfully ramping up every time, which makes you feel like every future endeavor is going to be equally as tough. If you’ve ever run into someone who seems to have boundless energy, who can fire off a 5 paragraph response to you and then still put in a full amount of work that day, you know what I mean. I’d like to be one of those people, and that’ll hopefully assure all this stuff in my head gets out of it, where it belongs. Lock your doors.

In terms of the workouts and gym sessions I’m now doing 3-4 times a week, there’s multiple reasons there as well. First, I was really starting to get worried about my general health, and a doctor told me a few things about my future lifespan that aren’t so hot to hear, so I can mitigate that by being generally more healthy, taking medicines, and eating somewhat right. But as has been proven countless times in the story of people, that’s not entirely useful as “the” reason to work out. So on top of that, I’ve been using these workout sessions to listen to podcasts and speeches of subjects I’m supposed to be “up” on, so I can comment on them more intelligently. Finally, I have this germ of an idea for a documentary/film/narrative that will have me be on screen, and I’ll be damned if I end up looking some sort of Hog God onscreen. So, between these three reasons, I can shift the blame while all the time getting some level of healthier.

I found a bug with the comment moderation, and 50 comments from the last year were being held in no-man’s land until I released them. Some included really old friends, so please forgive me everyone. This shouldn’t happen again, but promises of this sort are rough hedge bets against the future.

There is now, finally, a couple photos of me and a bio on the right column of the website, thereby officially making this weblog a complete sales-job for All That Is Jason.

Now let’s see if I can make it worth visiting.

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Summer camp was a requirement for me and my two siblings because the divorce settlement gave each parent a month with us and there was just no realistic way for my dad to take a month off of work to watch us. The first year of this, we were sent to a place called Surprise Lake Camp which was such an unmitigated disaster for me that it borders on cathartic even mentioning it, as one might idly mention the time they watched a pet killed before their eyes. While Surprise Lake is 105 years old and I am perfectly willing to say it had an off-year in my case, I’m sure it was me: the camp was mostly geared towards city kids and my father’s suburban home was 11 miles from the place. I got into fights, was the victim of insane, almost pathological pranks, and spent a lot of my time plotting horrible and nightmarish scenarios to either end my own life or a convenient, ever-shifting handful of nearby bullying maniacs. I often threatened to walk home and one of the counselors mentioned to me towards the end of my time there, “Holy Crap, you really could have done that.” I suppose I qualify as an “alumni” of the place but my attendance of any function there would end in fire. Lots and lots of fire.

My father reluctantly agreed with my preference to never go near that camp again and the next year, 1983, I instead went to Computer Tutor Summer Camp, in Williamstown Massachusetts. Every day I spent there made up for the entire punishing summer I’d spent at Surprise Lake the previous year.

Computer Tutor was one of that breed of Computer Camp that rose up in the 1980s, this freakish combination of outdoors activities and honing of programming skills that was often the result of a previously all-outdoors summer camp building a “lab” near the administration buildings and holding haphazard “classes” there. I choose Computer Tutor, although there were actually a whole selection that I found, including Old Acres Computer Camp in Indiana (which I’ve scanned the brouchure for) and the holy grail, the Atari Computer Camps at Club Med. This 1983 Time Magazine article gives a sense for the weird, almost opportunistic vibe these places give, looking back. Being 13 at the time and totally down with the wonders of computers, it made total sense that there’d be camps all over the country with computers at them. But it’s quite obvious that in many cases it was just a matter of strapping a “computer” theme to your busted-out camp with duct tape and then hanging up your new cyber-shingle.

Computer Tutor, however, was a little different. It was basically a summer program being held at Williamstown, Massachusetts, within the confines of a college: Williams College, to be exact. So no weiner roasts, no musty cabins, no hikes down to the latrines. When I was brought there by my dad, my suitcase brimming with clothes and books but very little technical gear, I was checked into a dormitory. Space was so huge that I didn’t even have a roommate. There were a total of about 20 of us, mostly boys but with a couple girls to balance things out. We didn’t have a mess hall; we ate at the college cafeteria. And let me diverge off into a segueway here: We were given meal plan cards.

Imaging being 13 years old and suddenly given not only your own room in a beautiful campus (and the campus was very beautiful, especially in summer), but given a little card that would allow you unlimited food forever while the magic Food Building was open. Anyone who knows and hangs out with me has seen how fast and how much I can eat if I don’t watch myself. I am quite positive this is where it came from: endless sodas, mountains of entres and desserts, side dishes by the truckload. To be thirteen years old and have a beautiful dorm room, unlimited meals, an environment of summer college sleepiness, and a requirement to play with computers each and every day… where’s the downside here?

I might as well drop in the picture I have of the 1983 group that was taken, likely as a promotion, but which I’ve cherished ever since:

That’s me in the middle, second row, just under the guy with the beard and the afro. He and the fellow with the black beard to his right were the main counselors. There’s a counselor all the way to the right, and the rest are the kids of the camp. It’s nice to have mementos like this. The moral of this is take more photos. I look like the dictionary definition of “geek” and we’re all wearing the camp shirt but I’m one spectacularly happy motherfucker in this photo, even if I look like I’m scowling. Trust me.

The kids at Surprise Lake, besides being either bullies or indifferent ghosts, were also not blazingly smart, or hid smarts so they’d fit in. At Computer Tutor, they all were smart. I thought I was smart and then found out, watching the other kids in action, that I was actually the keeper of a sort of intelligence fog, a general sense of understanding things well but with no focus. There were two kids who would play chess games. During our occasional outings. In their heads. They’d call the moves out at each other and then keep walking around or hanging out, considering their next moves. This blew me away. Similarly, some of the kids were doing stuff on the computers that I just had no idea could be done. They’d use variable name conventions or graphics functions or whatever else they’d learned elsewhere and I was flat-footed. I realized I knew shit from shit and the only way I could have previously considered myself good at computers was because I was comparing myself to squirrels.

The town of Williamstown was rather small, and for a kid with very little in the way of money (why would I need it, after all?), there was very little to do. I remember when I found the local arcade, a hole in the wall affair that was gifted with a half-dozen machines, of which I can clearly remember Xevious and Tron. I spent some time there but not much at all, considering how much else there was to do.

I could fill the pages with memories of all those little things that happen at camp; the glances at girls, the solitary walks through new locations, the triumph of a learned phrase, the tears of laughter from an incredible joke or prank, the sorrow at a missed opportunity. I think anyone who’s been a youth and stayed over somewhere knows these things. I’ll confine myself to two memories, both related to computers.

The first is that piracy was rampant at camp. When the alpha counselor wasn’t around, the sub-counselors would let the kids whip out their pirated games collection and “warez trade” right in the lab. The alpha counselor had hurt her leg in some fashion and required a cane to get to the lab, so when she was in sight, there was plenty of time to stash away the disks and return to “normal” before she walked in. She didn’t walk over all that much. At the end of camp, she gave a very moving talk about the things we’d learned and she stressed the importance of ethics in using computers, of not pirating software and not taking advantage of others. I still remember the glances from the sub-counselors at us, almost as if to say Well, unless you really have to.

I didn’t have any floppy disks, so I couldn’t be a part of the copy parties, and when I went out to see if I could buy any, the place nearby wanted fifteen dollars for two floppies. And people ask me if I wish we could return to those times!

The second memory is more exact: the most popular game, by far, was The Bilestoad, which was a game for the Apple II created by “Mangrove Earthshoe”, and which featured a top-down view of two walking knight-like creatures who would slice and dice the living crap out of each other. This game was jaw-dropping. It had scrolling over a massive playing field, and when the two characters were not near each other, it would flip between them. I saw that game, at my young age, and I realized these crazy things could do anything if you tried hard enough. I never ever forgot that game, and even though I didn’t have an Apple II, I remember buying a copy of it in the store and keeping it in my collection, where it stays to this day.

“Mangrove Earthshoe” was the pseudonym of Marc Goodman. An excellent interview of Dr. Goodman is here. He mentions having never met someone who had official copy of the game. Maybe I’ll fix that.

Like I said, I have hundreds of memories from my two summers at Computer Tutor Summer Camp. By the time I was 15, I’d moved fully into running my own BBS and all sorts of other activities, and I didn’t go back. Possibly, there was no Computer Tutor camp to go back to… a lot of camps simply dried up and left when the home computer boom flattened out and you didn’t need to go “somewhere” to learn about computers. I’m glad I got my time with them, and the dorm living and eating totally changed how I looked at the world; I knew there were places out there that you could be your own person, respected as an individual, and trusted to take care of yourself. For some, 13 would be a little late to learn this, but it’s never too late to learn these lessons if you haven’t already.

Computer Camp… Life never was better for me than those two summers.

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Many times, the roles that are taken up in an online community that’s based around a “thing” are so structured and expectant that you could almost fashion carved wooden masks for them. You’d choose to wear that mask and then hop on stage and do the dance that so many have done before you. I don’t have direct evidence for this but I suspect it goes many many years back, those conversations lost to history.

There’s similar templates for offline communities but that’s someone else’s job to describe them, and I suspect academic libraries are jammed full of those descriptions. Come to think of it, they’re probably jammed with descriptions of online communities too, but here’s mine, subject to refinement. Consider it a rough first shot at these definitions, with you getting what you paid for.

Let’s start with the roles themselves.

The first is Very Communicative Person. VCP is the main motivator of conversations, and will jump into all of them if they have the time to. Sometimes they know what’s going on and sometimes not, but they’re not hostile about it. In fact, you kind of feel bad telling them they’re wrong, because they’re being so nice about them. If a community is lucky, they’ll have half a dozen of these folks online and your new cycle (a week on BBSes, an hour on web forums) will reveal another round of insights. Without at least a couple VCPs, your community is very very dead-looking, and not likely to attract new people.

The Flighty Tourist is someone who doesn’t normally go into the community but who might stumble upon it due to a weblink, or (in the BBS era) an index card on a bulletin board at a computer store, or a phone number a buddy gave them, or any one of a hundred opportunities. Unfortunately, they don’t really know what all this community is, what it’s about, what’s cool and isn’t cool, and so on. But they do know how to post! So post they do, either contributing an already-long-answered question or misunderstanding the fundamental nature of things. The FT is useful for the same reason that it’s good to occasionally get the flu; a little crisis now and then will rally the troops and make people understand the tight-knit nature of the community (or, on the other extreme, the insularity of it). Some FTs even become community members, which is even greater because they feel like they have slowly earned respect from humble beginnings. Of course, too many FTs coming in at once and the whole cabbage goes to rot.

The Tiresome Contrarian is universally hated but somehow doesn’t let that universal hate stop them from constantly posting the fact that everyone else is not just wrong, but personally flawed. Imagine a big purple rolling ball that belches and throws up. Imagine that you’re working on something in your room and every once in a while you see the purple ball roll by your open door. Damn if you don’t want that ball to roll in where you’re trying to get something done. And if it does, then that sinking feeling you get is quickly followed by having to clean up the vomit. Same with the conversation or piece of the community in question. TC shows up and the party just went from happy dancing to two people facing off with broken bottles. Sometimes, like an FT, a TC can be a good way to bring the strength of the culture up to a higher level, but that’s playing with fire.

The Power-Imbued Elite can either be the person who runs the community, or someone who is given administrative powers by the owner, or, in a few rare cases, someone who dominates the whole shebang by sheer force of will. Once the PIE enters a conversation, it can warp the thing as easily as a magnet dropped into the back of a TV. Look at all the pretty colors! People, it often seems, like having an elite, or at least a benevolent leader, who they can communicate with and whose word is, ultimately law. It helps settle arguments pretty fast, and it’s a kick when they weigh in in the middle of a discussion. You sit up and listen, as does everyone else. Naturally, if the PIE is always popping in and being a constant contributor, then they can often revert down to a VCP and you kind of forget they’re a PIE until something whacky happens and then they grow wings and shoot lasers out of their eyes and you make whatever sound for you represents “woah”. Too many PIEs flexing their muscles and the same problem as the TCs taking over: chaos, then death.

The House Organ Grinder does not always make an appearance in a community, but when they do, the whole place benefits. A HOG will keep track of the file sections, or suggest doing an introductory textfile, or will archive all the old messages for easy perusing later. They might run a newsletter or a support group or handle where the pizza parties go. They don’t “own” the place but they can sometimes have more than a passing voice of authority if they decide to. Often they won’t, however, and they’ll simply pipe in to tell everyone they’ve been working very hard and they have something to show you that you’ll like. HOGs are probably the easiest members to burn out, since they’re sometimes doing even more work than the PIE.

Matrix across these roles the following critical events that happen in most communities. These are the myths, the stories that these masks then assemble into to provide a dependable show and often a predictable outcome.

The Loss of Important Infrastructure can be as simple as a hard drive dying or as complicated as a unexpected lack of compatibility between required-but-dodgy modules in years-old program code. It can rise from a network outage, or a disasterous upgrade attempt. However this happens, the result is the same: a mad scramble among the members, statements of what the community means to them, a call to arms, and a declaration/offering of support. The community is in danger of disappearing! If we just band together and show the world how strong we are, we’ll survive this unexpected bump in the road. Sometimes the PIE causes the crisis themselves by deciding not to go on, and others might offer to take the community out of their hands. And sometimes it’s just a matter of everyone chucking in $10 and a new drive is bought. This critical event can often be the first time a community realizes that it really is a community. It can also be the first time it realizes it is not. This is also an excellent time to shoot the TC, hide the body and plant a bush over it. By the time the smoke clears, nobody notices we’re down one asshole.

The Radical Change in the Makeup of the Place can occur with the influx of money, the spontaneous leaving of a lot of VCPs, the shifting of PIEs, or even the HOG burning out and not uploading a newsletter any more. The software, the hardware, it’s all fine. But the makeup of the people has shifted, and maybe you find out that you weren’t showing up because of the cool door games or the flash animations or the porn uploads but because of the people, people who are now gone. When a community is sold off or merged or otherwise affected by outside parties who want to squeeze it for a little street cred or even cold hard cash, they can often find out that they have been gifted with an empty shell and the crab has crawled away overnight. Either way, it is often the sign of the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, or the beginning of a new beginning. When you look back from the perspective of years, you can tell that something changed, something deep. Please bear in mind, this is an absolutely unavoidable occurence and people constantly think it’s something that can be protected against, but you can’t, as long your community is actually composed of human beings.

The Ruinous Hatred can happen after the Radical Change or the Loss of Important Infrastructure, but sometimes it happens on its own, due to events far outside the control of the PIE. Someone sleeps with someone else. Someone owes someone money. Someone punches out someone else at a party. Maybe even within the community, an act as simple as a message/file deletion or banning of a person sets it off. The point is, people are forced to take sides and when that happens, when a civil war erupts within the community, there is almost no chance for it to survive unscathed. The PIE can rush in and declare a stop to it, the VCPs can explain it away, but what really happens is this is the TC’s time to shine. They jump into this like vultures on a corpse and go to town, making people speak out who otherwise would have been wisely silent, and old minor disagreements come back to haunt the messages, strengthened with this new spilling of blood. This is when someone will say my favorite phrase: “You’ve Ruined Everything”, blaming the people who took the side they don’t like, or blaming the HOG for reporting the facts, or the PIE for not being more firm. Often this person is a TC, but sometimes it can be a VCP who’s having a bad evening or a headache. It’s often as bad as it can get.

The Death represents the final days when the community is well and truly gone. The artifacts are still around and if people point out or reference the artifact, a VCP or HOG or PIE or even a TC can step in and go “yeah, I used to be there, it was great/horrible/nice”, but when you ask they why they’re not still there, they can point to the time of the Ruinous Hatred or the Infrastructure Crisis and say that it wasn’t the same after that. The only surprise here is that people debate what could have been done to avoid this situation. And the fact is, there often isn’t one.

Communities are born, live and die, just like the people in them. We hop on the stage, wear our masks, and play the acts out. Some of us don’t want to bow and admit the play is over, so we just walk away and never get our goodbyes in until it’s too late. That’s a choice each person makes, but if I may, I’d like to suggest the recognition that each community is a floating bubble, imbued with the power given to it by its inhabitants, and that all these bubbles pop. Treat them, when you can, like the amazing parties they are, the magical miracles of coincidence and interaction that we ride in, and then remember to take our bows gracefully as it scatters to the wind.

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I live outside of Boston, but generally everything within the confines of the 95/128 ring road/interstate is considered “Boston” by the outside world. So let’s just say I live in Boston.

I actually have lived in the city proper, and a bunch of other towns with silly names that sound vaguely English and sometimes not, like Cambridge, Belmont, Waltham, Medford. I first started living here when I was 17, having been given a limit of about 150 miles to move away to college by my parents and shooting for the upper limit. I moved here for my freshman year at school and I never moved back, so here I’ve been since. That’s about 19 years, which is almost 20 years, which basically makes me a resident, and not some errant drunk tot belching out his undergraduate studies and considering himself a part of the elder gods of Beantown.

So let me say, for myself, speaking for whatever portion of the population I belong to: I’m really fucking sorry about this whole Lite Brite Bomb thing. Really sorry. Please accept my apology, my personal apology for this tornado of dumbassery and overreaction and move on.

Boston has some very, very stupid things about it. It’s terrified of 24 hour activity, so there are only 3 (three, I am saying) 24 hour eating establishments within the city and surrounding area. It is rife with corruption and misappropriation, and it’s almost impossible to negotiate its streets, even on foot, unless you’re a hardened veteran of hedge mazes.

And I fully admit that this place is totally capable of some very stupid “controversies” indeed, although I can’t remember the last time it got millions of dollars out of a company and the head of its president besides. In fact, as a measure of goodwill, I will remind you of one: the Super Soaker Scandal.

Back in the summer of 1992, a report went by that some kids in Boston were putting bleach or urine inside Super Soakers and squirting victims with them (Note to young readers; Do not do this). Additionally, there was a tragic case where a 15-year-old died when some waxbrian pulled out a real handgun during a supersoaker fight and shot him. There’s various ways a city can deal with these sorts of tragedies, from tracking down perpetrators to calling for programs to redirect youth violence in positive directions. Boston, of course, immediately sought to ban Super Soakers. Some stores voluntarily pulled Super Soakers off the shelves in a show of support for this misdirected hatred of big plastic squirt guns. (I, for what it’s worth, immediately bought 4.) It got as far as legislative bills being proposed before, you know, summer ended and nobody gave a shit anymore. We moved on.

So Boston has a history of this. It happens. I’m sorry.

BoingBoing has been particularly fanning the flames of insulting the city and slowly moving towards shifting those insults to people who live there, and as someone who has benefited to the tune of thousands of dollars from BoingBoing’s attention, I still have to say, it’s getting way overboard.

This is part of the problem with Boingboing’s structure, which often serves people well (consistent updates, strong characters of main contributors, mix of technical and organic subjects), but sometimes does not (almost no fact-checking apparatus, promotion of 3-5 year old stories as brand new, over-the-top black-and-white reaction to somewhat subtle and nuanced conflicts). In the case of Boston, we get to one of the core issues I have: bullying. Having posted well over a dozen entries about all possible aspects of this event, they’ve now moved into simply using “Boston” as an adjective for “Backwater”. “Wearing [light-up bras] in Boston could get you arrested.” and the like. Mean spirited and not appreciated, and when the next stupid thing in the world happens, the focus will shift there.

Please stop doing that.

My city has flaws, my city has problems, and as was just shown by this unintentional multi-city fire drill, it can go completely over-the-top bugfuck over what’s obviously a stupid misunderstanding. I’m sorry that everyone had to see this; it’s like having a drunken relative get into the paper. It’s just a shame it got all this attention.

I promise to stay my hand a little bit when it’s someone else’s turn. And, again, I’m sorry.

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