ASCII by Jason Scott

Compared the slow tank-like progress of the BBS Documentary, GET LAMP is like a shopping cart aimed backwards going down a hill. On fire. The schedule is heavily bumped up, and since I’ve been through this process before, I have a much better awareness of limits and needs and the rest.

As a result, I’ve already been getting in soundtrack music. I’ve been communicating with other music artists to bring songs into the project. I’ve been in contact with the cover artist. I’m beginning discussions with my duplicator. And I’ve begun filleting.

Fiction films have the advantage of a general idea of what’s being aimed for, what script/context is at the other end. Granted, you can have an unexpected event change everything, or an incompetent director, or a mid-production script change, but even then, you replace a set of scripted events with another set of scripted events and keep shooting. The goal is to have it look and sound good, be enjoyable to watch, and fit in with the rest of what you’re shooting. So you generally shoot 2-3 times the footage you intend to end up with. More, of course, if you’re a perfectionist director and want something just right. But still, it all comes down to: you are working toward a set script.

Nonfiction or documentary filmmaking can be split down further: you have scripted non-fiction and unscripted non-fiction. In scripted non-fiction, you again have a script, even though everything’s coming from truth this time and not somebody’s fantasy or made-up story. You then gather photos, audio, and artifacts to shoot footage from, and then anything you can’t find that kicks into your script is either brought in with interviews or shot as a recreation, which fits all the puzzle pieces into place. The ratio of shot footage to final footage is again relatively small, since you know exactly what you want, and when you go to people to conduct interviews, you hit them up with 5-10 questions of a specific nature and include what they give you.

But then you get to the stuff like I did before and am doing again, where you basically sit down with people and talk to them on-camera and get “the story” as you go. At the end you have a pile of footage and then cull it into something else, where the final work is something you didn’t really know you’d have at the beginning of the production. This approach is comparitively expensive because of the insane ratio: I shot 250 hours of footage, resulting in roughly 5 hours of used footage. That’s a 50-1 ratio. And I’m just on the low end: some documentary filmmakers will do 100-200 hours for each hour they end up with. A contemporary example of this is the movie Hoop Dreams, which followed two boys for five years, amassed 250 hours of footage and got cut down to around 3 hours. (They shot on Beta videotape, by the way). That’s a lot of time with little variety in the shooting; I at least got to travel a lot and meet different people every time.

(I should mention, by the way, that because of all this open-endedness and months or years of shooting, it is therefore very likely for a project shot like this to “fail”, to come out the other end with all sorts of footage that is of no real obvious use or narrative potential.)

So somewhere in there, you have to take the hundreds of hours of footage and knock it down into editable pieces, properly marked off, that you’re going to try and piece together into a narrative. That’s where you have to go through a process that I call “the fillet”, although I’ve seen it called logging or clipping, and probably a dozen other names. Here’s how this works.

First, you stare at this 12 hours a day:

This is the user interface to my editing software. From there, you listen to an interview, and when the person makes a statement, shows some emotion, reacts, or otherwise does anything that might potentially go into your documentary, you cut out that clip. I happen to do all this wrong: I clip out the entire answer, and render it into a new clip in a lossless fashion (i.e. I don’t “re-render” it, adding needless compression or introducing extra artifacts). I name this clip in a highly descriptive manner, like this one I just did: “Moriarty – KEEPER – The period of success for Infocom was very brief”. This tells me it’s from the Brian Moriarty interview, that he talks about the success of infocom, but also does so cutting it down to just a few peak years. I then put all these cuts into a folder set, where this would go into a further sub-folder called “Infocom”. That way, if I need to pull “Infocom” stuff, I go in there and there’s a set of clips from people talking about Infocom.

Does this sound boring? It can be. I literally have to listen to every interview I did at least once again, and occasionally multiple times, carefully pulling and marking away every possibly relevant clip. But the result of this hard work is evident in the final film: everything seems to weave together. I’m able to pull together commentary from many different interviews over years and people almost complete each other’s sentences.

The amount of clips any one interview yields varies greatly. In BBS Documentary, I’d have one hour interviews that resulted in one used sentence.. Others went on for an hour and I used 10 or 20 minutes of that hour in the final works. Obviously, I can’t predict how it’ll go this time, but I am finding a pretty high ratio of “usable” clips to choose from, so it’s going well.

This is what I have to work on during days I’m not filming folks. I’m creating a library of thoughts and concepts, the bricks that I will eventually use to build my little house of documentary before inviting others inside. It’s definitely not for everyone, but it’s a necessary step if you wish to reveal the narrative buried in a hundred interviews.

Before I go, a little math problem:

The high definition codec I’m recording in requires 4 gigabytes for every 10 minutes. I have recorded 35 hours of footage. How many shares in Seagate should you buy?

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Things are actually kind of nice in my life. Interesting projects, good day job, good friends, tens of thousands of new goatse-loving fans, and a general happy demeanor. Only one problem: weight.

Ah yes, that last frontier, that one bit that no amount of studying, debating, excusing or justifying will get away from: personal health. That’s my next thing to overcome, and then I think I’ll be one pretty joyful motherfucker.

Happily, it’s not been a downward trend the last 4 years or so:

But going from roughly 230-something to 210-something is merely a case of dropping endless snacks and junk food into my head. Cutting out something and then not adding other activity is just a recipe for disaster, waiting gingerly for something else to go wrong and then you’re back to square one.

I finally joined a gym this past Tuesday, and I’ve had workout sessions on Thursday and Saturday, with professional assistance in doing so. I’m using an interesting methodology to ensure continued attendance: I joined a stupidly expensive club. Like, where you expect Geishas to be holding your free iPod for you breathlessly until you return that day. This is the heretofore-unknown Capitalist Health Program: Spend a Lot of Money and feel like you’re totally blowing cash if you don’t go. I’m signed up for a year and I even read the contract. What a great piece of work! When your year is up, if you don’t send a registered letter saying you’re done with them (or sign up for another year), they start charging you even more. The best part is I knew this and signed it anyway, which gives me even more incentive to pay attention. (Other bonus: If you move away and there’s another club in the chain within 25 miles, you can’t drop the membership claiming you’re not nearby).

I’ll never forget this kid: he was on IRC, a little trash-talking knobjob who worked out obsessively, had a lot of photos of himself up flexing his muscles, and generally added to the general quality of online life. Picked a lot of fights as a matter of course, and one of my favorite memories was his challenging everyone in the IRC channel to a fistfight at the next Defcon.

All well and good, and the dustbin of history will welcome that little punk happily, except for one little exchange where I said it was my hope to improve my physical fitness.

“You will fail!” said Mister Fistfight. “You’re just like all the rest of these people – no discipline, no nerve. You say you’ll stick the course and you have no discipline and you go back to your chair.”

Well, time to see who’s right. Now, if you don’t mind, I have an appointment with some Geishas.

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If you were lucky enough to have an RSS feed, you got to see a letter from a person criticizing me and questioning my psychological makeup based on my “Fuck Katie Hafner” entry. Quick research showed he was in the same faculty of a school as Hafner’s current husband, so there you go. I wrote him back, and he actually wrote a lovely, contrite response apologizing for his initial outburst and promising to find out what the heck I didn’t like about Hafner.

Don’t you love getting a story before the webmaster pulls it down? I do, and I have the .tar.gz and .zip files to prove it. And now some of you have one of mine! What a collector’s item.

Anyway, the core misunderstanding between me and the writer was that he’d found this decontextualized hate of Katie Hafner’s work, and went off since I looked completely Gonzo. A certain segment of the population will go “Oh, yeah, Mitnick and Cyberpunk” and of them, there’s some amount of drift because they didn’t, in fact, read Cyberpunk and are simply following the flow. In other words, there’s a lot of player hating and very little backup.

In 2001, I started working on a website about hacking, and misrepresentation in media and news. This went through a bunch of iterations, and it currently stands at hacker.textfiles.com. I never got around to linking it from the main site; I’ll fix that shortly.

Hacker is meant to be a definitive location for “the story” when it comes to the term, culture, and historical references. I have gotten along with it, but the problem is the whole bile/methodical ratio issue. Let me explain.

There is a section in the hacker sub-site called ERRATA. This is meant to put down, in a location easily referenced, a full set of corrections, clarifications and ridicule of books by and about hackers. The most galling part of a lot of books is they contain hyperbole, poor phrasing, and flat-out incorrect facts. It would be good if someone went through and catalogued the errors. That person, apparently, is me.

You have things that piss you off. You therefore gain bile. (Think of a little meter to the right of your vision, and it says “Bile” and it’s blinking red.) Now you’re angry, and you want to lash out. The problem is, bile doesn’t really go for the whole “measured response” thing. So you end up with a choice: lash out anyway (fuck yeah!) or hold off, get a grip, and then lay out the high road. But once you wait, the bile is gone, and the urge to take the high road is replaced with a general apathy.

I’m sure this could all be drawn with a 2-D chart. You have the axis going from Action to Apathy, and the axis going from Bile to Methodical. Here, let me do it, so it looks like I’ve thought about this for more than 5 seconds:

As you can clearly see, you run the risk of things being too blue (very methodical and with lots of detail, but boring) or red (you get your feeling across, but it makes you look insane) or black (you fade into the distance and are just another one-line “lol” message). What you want is for it to be purple. Oh, so very purple.

To properly work on the errata section, I have to go through an entire book, marking off potential factual or stylistic errors, and then research them, and then put up my corrections. This is the most boring thing you can imagine, but if you mess up, you miss important stuff. So it’s kind of like being an aircraft controller. But not.

Anyway, the thing is, there’s a lot of books out there that are absolutely horrible. An example is Confessions of Teenage Hackers by Dan Verton. I think this book is one of the worst you can stumble into; it flat-out exploits children, letting them weave their own hero-myths and portray themselves as a super-race of technological wizards, and it chokes every page with rampant hyperbole about the prowess and outcome of these myths. Additionally, it gets basic historical facts wrong: most notably, it takes the story of the 1990 AT&T Crash, where an internal software bug took out the phone system for a while and this triggered an ongoing FBI investigation into hackers, and turns it on its head. In his version, the hackers actually crashed the system. He even uses the phrase “crackdown on hackers”, an obvious reference to the book The Hacker Crackdown, which tells (that part of) the story accurately. An e-mail to Verton about this got a reply to “get a life”.

And that’s the fundamental problem; it really does take a while to fact-check and put it all out in some way for it to be easily readable. You know, like my chart.

The first book that’s gone under my knife is Hacker Culture by Douglas Thomas. I found a bunch of explicit errors, stylistic errors, and poor word choices. I feel a little bad he gets nailed first, because there’s others that are even more problematic, but you have to start somewhere!

When time permits, I’ll add more. And that brings us to the main question: why even do this at all?

Well, for the same reason I go bugfuck over Wikipedia architectural issues: people use these works for reference. The whole point of assembling ideas into non-fiction books is so that others don’t have to do that work. If you put out a book explaining how a sub-culture works, then it’s expected, to some amount, that what’s in there is accurate. Of course, there should always be multiple competing books when possible, but often the books use each other as reference. They’ll clearly say this in the back, of course, but that’s when you get to the end and that’s not always something a person will look up. So, for example, you have an enormous amount of sources that claim John Draper/Captian Crunch “discovered” the roughly-2600hz-blowing Captain Crunch Whistle. He didn’t. He did not. Let’s say this one more time: John Draper Did Not Discover That the Captain Crunch Whistle Included In Cereal Boxes Could Blow a Rough Approximation of 2600 Hertz. Draper is more explicit about this now, but he wasn’t always and let the “error” pass, and it’s everywhere. It’s reasonable for a lot of people to think this is the case because there’s a ton of “reference” out there saying so.

And so it goes: I want to vet and clean sources as best I can, check references, check up on facts, for the good of history. Otherwise, why bother learning all this at all?

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So back in November I got a Nintendo Wii. Actually, I grabbed a latte (which I don’t often do), and drove around like an idiot on November 19th, Wii Day, to try and get a Wii from the stores. The first one had 140 people waiting for 120 Wiis. The next had 15 people waiting for 4 Wiis. I then found a place that had 15 people waiting for 40 Wiis.

Why put myself through that? I just like momentary madness like that. I also go shopping on December 24th and occasionally run towards and not away from danger. I’m sure this will catch up with me but not quite yet.

I will not bore you with tales of using the Wii and what the Wii does. The Internet is currently between 67% and 81% full of current-generation console discussion, no need for me to retread that part.

On the Wii, in the 5-in-1 sports pack, is a bunch of games of golf, baseball, bowling and so on. And tennis. For whatever reason, me and Tennis got off to a good start, and we started hanging out a lot, and I was entirely into Tennis for a while.

In Tennis, you get a “rating”, which has almost no meaning but which I think relates to how many times you’re scored against by the computer and how quickly you win, and so on. It climbs bizzarely, like awarding you “+3” for a game you might have really been into and “+109” for a game set that wasn’t so bad.

There was a line on the chart, at 1000. Nothing explained in the game itself what this line was useful for. So I started playing the game, a lot, and eventually got to 1000.

In the “Wii Inbox”, which is a sort of mail inbox the Wii has to make you feel like you have friends, it then announced that I had achieved 1000, and I was now a “Pro”. It then put a little “Pro” after my name, and I guess at this point I was supposed to jump up and down, were I not laid flat from playing Tennis.

So, the little line is halfway up the chart, and I decide to keep playing.

The game starts throwing harder and harder opponents at me until I meet “Elisa”, who is rated at “2000”. I beat Elisa, because at this point I’m like a lab rat with a cocaine switch. I’m an unbeatable pseudo-tennis machine. This gave me another mail in my Wii mailbox, explaining that I had successfully beaten Elisa, a 2000-rated player. My own rating, however, was 1700. So I decided to see what happened next.

Now, after a while it was like Zeno’s paradox. If I won it gave me a couple points, and if I lost it took out tens of points. What a jerk! Tennis and I were in danger of breaking up.

But you know, I kept at it, and in a few games that could be considered “epic” if you didn’t know what “epic” means, I broke the chart. Literally.

So mostly, I guess, I’m confused. If the game had enough thought into it to have all this stuff of sending letters to tell me how cool I am, and to tell me how cool it is I broke a 2000-rated player, why does it appear it is completely catching this game off guard to have me become a 2000-rated player myself? It’s nice and all that I’ve made it look like it does, but isn’t this a shame?

I think what I’m trying to get across is that if your game makes all these implications that something is the unstoppable Mantle of Greatness, and you award a person with a mail and a rating for achieving 0.5 Mantles of Greatness, consider putting something at the end to deal with the maniac who achieves 1.0 Mantles. I expect this sort of short-sightedness with Pac-Man arcade games crashing at level 255, not a Nintendo Wii in 2007.

There. Now I’m a whiny geek on a weblog talking about his video games. I assume it’s the late hour. Maybe I’m a Were-gamer.

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• Don’t ever call again. But if you do:
• If you’re going to leave a message on my phone about how you can help textfiles.com with marketing, be sure to clarify to me whether:
  • you’re asking me to whore out my users to whatever money-waving Johns you intend to send my way
  • you’re seeking to sidle up to me like a swampland-in-Florida salesman and make me buy your services to increase traffic to a site that features ascii art nudes.
• Typing “Textfiles.com advertising” into Google reveals a weblog entry called “Why Is There No Advertising on Textfiles.com?”. Since the whole point of that essay is that I don’t want any advertising on textfiles.com, you were functioning at an informational disadvantage.
• Since reading is hard and you can’t be expected to do actual research on a site you’re hitting up, next time just ask yourself why a site that has been around for eight years has no advertising. Chances are, it’s not because they are totally unaware there’s a thing like advertising on the Internet.
• Avoid keeping the speakerphone on when my voicemail message starts, so it doesn’t sound like you needed both hands to whack off while leaving your scripted message.
  
• Consider that the sudden burst in the Alexa rating of textfiles.com is because my site provided a photo of a prodigiously stretched rectum to over 100,000 people, and decide if this means I’m the type of “content partner” that’s going to possibly keep any links from your clients ass-free.

• Die.

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M.C. Frontalot, a “nerdcore hiphop” rapper who I have come to admire very much, has just let me know that the trailer for the Nerdcore documentary has been released. If you’ve not had the pleasure of listening to work by M.C. Frontalot, then you’re in luck, because his website has a large variety of MP3s he’s created over the past few years, as well as information on his performances and album for sale.

It’s easy enough to throw out a rap or two (in fact, I’ve been known to do a rap myself), but to not only construct a song that tells a story, has amusing rhymes, is clever without seeming contrived, and going in all sorts of neat directions… that takes talent. And Frontalot has talent.

The first song I ever heard of his was called “Message No. 419”, which is essentially about Nigerian Scam e-mails, and it’s beautifully contructed. I knew I wanted to hear more from him, and I’ve not been disappointed since.

I was lucky enough to attend a performance he gave on his last tour and was impressed not only with the strength of his backing band but that he could deliver these unusually complicated lines flawlessly through a ton of songs. The bar was this little place down in the village and a bunch of old friends came along, making it just a fantastic night all around. It was also filmed for the Nerdcore documentary, so I guess there’s a slim chance I’m in the background in one of the shots.

Frontalot has actually moved from San Francisco to the Boston area, meaning he’s just around the bend from where I live. There’s been some talk between us of collaboration, so we’ll see where that goes.

The trailer’s pretty impressive, and I’m sure the documentary behind it will be good. It has Weird Al! Who can argue!

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When I finished work on the BBS Documentary and said I was going to make a couple more, one of my pithy remarks was that I liked pretty much everything about the BBS Documentary except the video and the sound.

What I meant was that I’d shot everything on the run with a Canon XL-1 which was now long in the tooth, and it had issues with recording sound via the type of microphone I’d used, so if I was going to go through the production of another documentary, I wanted to upgrade. And upgrade I did! Thousands and thousands of dollars later, I had myself a very kick-ass piece of optical kit, ready to capture the new subjects in stunning lifelike quality.

Because I did this, I naturally expected a quantum leap in image and sound quality. And I got it. But then I started wondering if it was what I thought it was.

This self-doubt enters the mind of anyone slaving away at a perfectionist idea lodged in their brain. Is what I have before me as good as the way I dreamed it’d be? Did I achieve, with this new craftsmanship, a component that will compliment and improve the whole? Am I doing the subject justice? Does it sound good?

I found that I go through periods where I look at what I’ve shot and think it’s horrible, beyond saving, ruinous. Other times I look at the same footage and delight at how wonderful it looks, how amazing the sound is. Naturally, this makes me come to a natural conclusion: I must have some sort of chemical imbalance.

But now that I’ve mulled over my intense mulling over things, I’ve come to a different conclusion: I contracted Connoisseurs’ Disease. You know it’s terminal because it’s really hard to spell.

Connoisseurs’ Disease blows because you might not notice you have it for a while and the symptoms simply appear that everything around you sucks. You wonder why the HD TV you’re watching isn’t all that impressive, or why the sound system isn’t all that amazing, or why your car doesn’t seem to have that much power, or why your friends aren’t as enjoyable as they should be. It’s not these outside things, it’s you. You’ve now convinced yourself or been convinced that reality isn’t good enough, and that just around the bend is another reality, a hyper-reality, that you’re being cheated out of. Or that you’re cheating yourself out of.

Last year, I had a steak. This wouldn’t be big news except it was very expensive steak. It was, in fact, a Kobe Fillet Mignon flown in from Japan and prepared by a Japanese Chef who I also assume was from Japan. It was expensive. Let’s not go into how expensive it was, but if you say it “must have been around $100” I will tell you you’re shooting low. Now, why the heck did I spend that much? Two reasons. Number one, I’m rather cognizant of my own mortality, but number two, the menu actually said, underneath, that it was “One of the finest human experiences on Earth”. I mean, come on, that at least gets a couple chews.

So there I am, eating my extremely expensive steak that’s essentially like chowing down a Nintendo Wii, and along comes some waiter, who then launches into a story about these truffles he has, which, and I am not being exaggerative here, he claims are picked on a special mountain which only lets these grow a few weeks a year and which go for $4,000 an ounce and which I could have on my stupidly expensive steak for a sum which was also stupidly expensive. That is, the dealer was offering to double down on my extravagance. Amazingly, I said no. I was quite content with overspending, not double-plus overspending.

As for the steak itself, could I have noticed the difference between this steak and one 1/10 the cost? Probably not. I could, after much study and comparison, have decided the cheaper steak was harder to chew, or slightly less fatty or any of a bunch of different made-up parameters I could consider vital along the Meat Continuum. But I’d be getting past the vital point: Did I enjoy eating the steak?

And as we were all taught in school, Video is Like Meat. OK, maybe you weren’t taught that. But what a lesson that’d be!

If you walk into one of the huge consumer electronics stores and walk back to that candy-like Massive TV section, and then walk right up to the screens, you can find flaws in all of them. Even the ones that cost as much as a Pontiac Aztek. You can see the rendering seem odd, or the colors unusual, or artifacting, or anything along the Video Continuum. Of course, this can also depend on the source being fed in, the wires going to them, and how your eyes are doing that day.

The functional question, though, is Am I enjoying watching this?. All the pixels-per-inch and contrast ratios don’t mean much if you’re having a good time seeing what you’re seeing.

I’m not saying self-criticism is bad. It’s just that it’s too easy to go from self-criticism to self-defeatism, where you start to assume you must be screwing up because you’re doing it and not somebody else who you don’t know but they must be experts and better than you. That’s when the disease has set in.

The shots are good. They don’t look like they were shot with a million dollar camera, but this is coincidentally the actual situation. I didn’t shoot with a million dollar camera, but I did a good job with what I had. I think I’ll focus on other things, and hope the disease wears off.

P.S. This is what the steak looked like. Yes, I took a picture. It lasted longer.

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So, a little more detail on GET LAMP, with some other information on ARCADE as a bonus.

I have enough new visitors for the moment to mention that besides killing puppies and melting the eyeballs of the html-challenged, I am also involved in making a couple documentaries. I made one a little while ago, found I liked it, and am now making a couple more. One is about text adventures and one is about arcades.

People who heard about this going on in October of 2005 and then sparsely throughout 2006 are probably wondering how exactly the whole thing is coming along.

Well, very nicely. It’s important, when mentioning a film, to have “screenshots”, so here’s one:

That’s Steve Meretzky. He did Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, A Mind Forever Voyaging and a bunch of other games. He’s also really mindful of the history of text adventures and knows everyone ever. A great guy, and one of many great folks I’ve met along the way so far.

If you click on it, you get the full high-definition shot.

If numbers are important, then here we go: I’ve recorded roughly 35 interviews. This has translated to roughly 40 hours of footage shot. That footage equals (roughly) 960 gigabytes of disk space. I’ve collected dozens of books and games related to interactive fiction. I’ve sent out or gotten back roughly 2,000 e-mails. I’ve spent something like $14,000 on this movie so far, minus roughly $5,000 the Adventurer’s Club helped me with.

I expect to be shooting into Autumn, have a finished thing by the end of the year, and DVDs showing up in people’s hands in Spring of 2008. That said, These are forward-looking statements that are dependent upon certain events, risks and uncertainties that may be outside the production’s control, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated.

There are still a lot of people I’d like to interview; over 70 in fact, some of them critical. Have there been people who I’ve liked to interview who I will not be able to? Well, a couple have said, flat-out, that they will not be interviewed. A couple simply don’t answer my mails (and I know they’re getting to them). A number have said they’re up for it but there’s some potential circumstances that may make it difficult for me to get to where they are. This is all usual, and happened previously on the other production. You work with what you have.

What do I have? Some amazing stuff, even already. The Infocom guys have been brilliant, the game theory experts have been well-spoken and intense, the “new school” have been bright and happy and informed, and the “old school” have been warm and friendly and insightful. I have historical memories, thoughts on the whole form of text adventures, on stuff that text adventures are like, and a bunch of insert shots of cool stuff. I definitely have the beginning of a good movie, although like a lot of documentaries it will be really good to some people are really not interesting to others, just like my last one. Try and satisfy everybody, and you please nobody.

I am now of the opinion that it’s likely this will come on two DVDs, standard definition, with high-definition versions on the DVD-ROM section. This is because I think the whole “high definition disc” thing is completely fucked up and isn’t going to resolve, and that way people who want to see it in high definition can just bring the thing onto their hard drives or what have you and see the thing that way. At the rate that stuff is happening, it’ll just be a car crash if I try to throw my “I’m not a major studio, I just like making films” hat into this horrible ring of fire and death. So that’s where my head is at the moment on that.

If you’re a person who thinks I should have interviewed for this by now, don’t hesitate to write me. I have people helping me with research and knowledge but I am also human, and you can save me a smacked forehead by writing now.

So, what of ARCADE? Well, I have 5 or so hours shot of that, as well as a couple things lined up, but don’t expect that thing anytime soon. I can’t imitate the sound the Eye of Doom made when I mentioned to him that ARCADE will be bigger than the BBS Documentary. I’m expecting 300 interviews and nine hours. So no, I slip time in on that when I am between shots for GET LAMP, but that one waits for 2008 before I really spend a lot of time on it like I am for the primary film.

I’ve met amazing people. I’m meeting more. Life is great.

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Did I mention I went to a Maid Cafe in Toronto this holiday? No, I guess I didn’t.

This place called the iMaid Cafe got all sort of weblog interest over the past few months, with people flipping out about, in order:

• There are things called “Maid Cafes” in Japan
• There are lots of them and they’re really weird
• There is a Maid Cafe opening in Toronto
• Toronto is kind of near the US so it’s like one’s opening in the US
• Something’s gone wrong and we’re all going to die

As it is, I spend some of my holidays up in Toronto so I decided it was a primo time to sneak off and go to this one, before (I assumed) it would utterly fail and disappear into footnoted history. I had no idea where the address was in relation to anything else, or what this place would entail, or anything that would resemble a plan.

Maid Cafes in Japan are basically weird hostess-filled clubs where all the girls (it’s generally all girls) dress up in a theme or along some sort of standardized costume, and then they fawn over you, get you drinks (or sometimes there are guys who do nothing but serve drinks while the girls hang out) and everyone has what I’m sure passes for a fantastic time. Some of these places are innocent as a theme park and some are as flat-out-pornographic as your tired little businessman heart desires. What they are, compared to certain segments of sensibilities, is weird. Harmless, but weird. I like harmless weird. I decided I was going to see this thing.

As it turns out, it’s in what is percieved to be a not nice area but in fact is not nice simply because it’s boring. The landscape is mostly barren, the housing is either mundane or pretty-looking but predictable, and the streets are clean, uninspiring and, from what little I saw of them, safe. It was also nowhere near the Toronto city center, or even in what would be considered urban area, which I would think stands as a prerequisite for a restaurant where the girls dress up in maids. Who gets that weird out in the suburbs?

I was happy to see, upon entering, that things were actually rather nice. Located at the base of an apartment building, in a range of stores which were Chinese-lettered first and English-lettered second, you normally wouldn’t look at this place twice while driving down the road. Or maybe even three times. But with its neat black-and-white checkerboard theme dominating the floor, menus and general decor, I wouldn’t find the whole thing out of place in any mall anywhere. It just happened to be that the waitress was dressed rather unusually:

The food was good; my buddy and I had bubble tea (which they had an enormous selection of). I had a beef curry and I am completely forgetting what my dining companion had, but it also had rice and some sort of meat. The soups were “chinese soup” which tasted as expected, and we forewent desert since the bubble tea fulfilled that role nicely. I was surprised by the range of selection in the menu: besides bubble tea, curry, rice dishes, and soups, there were also sandwiches and deli-like selections as well. A perfectly good, solid selection, not depending on the “gimmick” to get people to keep coming back. There was a widescreen TV up on the wall playing gangsta rap music videos, which was a tad odd. After a while, I started to notice that the videos themselves were pirated, all of them containing tags for the IRC channels the groups hung out in. I thought that made everything nicely Cyberpunk. Snoop Dogg was in the vast majority of them.

Places like this are like crack to weblogs: easily describable, easy to formulate a quick-n-easy opinion on, to make fun of or go “how cool” and then move on to the next easy target. Critically, these places need a website or a weblog with a mention/photo of the subject so the other weblogs can easily link there. Maybe I’m just in a weird phase of my life but if I can I try and make the effort to see what the thing being discussed is really like. I didn’t entirely know what to expect but I knew I wanted to see this “Maid Cafe”, and while it was in fact nothing like the Maid Cafes as I heard they are in Japan (for one thing, the waitress was flat-out a waitress, not a hostess, and she refused to let me take my picture with her), it was, on its own, a solid little place with a gimmick. Even without the gimmick they’d get business.

Reality failed me again, in this case, although if it was really like I’d truly imagined I’d probably have been arrested. I’ll be sure to compare this place to a real one in Japan one of these years. Until then, sayonara.

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Well, that was pretty frisky. I wrote a perhaps-ill-advised entry about having fun with myspace and hotlinking images and got visited by 78,000 individuals in less than 12 hours. The lesson is clear: talk more about goatse. My staff will get right on that.

I can always tell when this weblog gets outside of the “regular” audience when folks start complaining about the color scheme. White on black! How dare he!

But let’s go further than that. I can start to figure out that one of these stories has “broken wide” when I start seeing people who are falling all across a spectrum of opinion, including meta-opinion regarding issues not even brought up in the original story.

For example, browsing the hundreds of comments I’ve read here and elsewhere about my prank, I’ve found some of the following responses:

• I am horrified that Jason would do something this evil and terrible.
• I am utterly delighted that Jason would do something this evil and terrible.
• This is absolutely great, I hope he keeps doing it until the entire universal contingency of stupid people are forced to see Goatse until the end of their days.
• Let me take this time to tell you a story in which I, myself, am the star.
• Goatse is old. This trick is old. This discussion is old. I’ve been online since 1998.
• I believe, possibly, that Jason will go to jail because of this. Somehow.
• OH GOD WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME ABOUT CLICKING THAT

There’s almost a Brownian Motion aspect, where all these people who would normally not come into contact with each other end up doing so and there’s nothing dependable you can rely on as a base premise. Nothing is assumed, nothing is accepted. Fan mail sits next to hate mail. Disgust mingles with chortles, non sequitur blathering jostles with measured smiles from kindred spirits. That’s the biggest reward of these little flashes of relative fame.

The value system regarding “shock” photographs is worth noting too. For some people, Goatse is the most mundane, uninteresting of that family of images. There are much worse, people rise to say, and then they link to them and yes, they’re quite worse. I’ve done work on and off for a few years at rotten.com. I can assure you, there are things much worse, stuff that makes your left eyeball shout “take the controls” to your right eyeball and run back into the john to throw up.

Others, however, find Goatse at the tip-top or beyond what would be acceptable in this situation. Why couldn’t I be more clever about it, involve a gentle prodding or an advertisement for one of my websites or projects? Couldn’t a kind word have sufficed in contrast to a manually prolapsed rectum?

Oh, sure. I’m sure this could have been done a dozen different ways. I got into a big fight with some folks about watermarking images a ways back, and there were excellent formulas and suggestions involving htaccess and imagemagick and the rest. You know, nerd tools. And this whole issue had been on the backburner for some time, right up there with “Man, I really oughta finish describing this pile of files” and “Perhaps that e-mail from a month ago should get an answer”. It just happened that the roulette wheel fell on goatse that day, so I put it up. What was always more interesting to me was the issues that the whole situation represents, so I wrote a lengthy weblog entry about it, for the amusement of my readers. I just didn’t expect that many readers.

And make no mistake, I myself have been at the recieving end of unexpected shock images on many an occasion, so I’ve definitely had some of my own medicine. In fact, I can actually recall my very first time!

This would have been circa 1996, and I was browsing some porn newsgroup using a program called “Forte Free Agent”. This was basically a Usenet news reader that was geared towards pulling down images from a news server and serving them up in a browser. You’d aim it at, say, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.golf and then it would put up the first photo it downloaded, then wait for you to arrow or click to the next. While by now this might seem mundane, at the time it was a breathtakingly simple process rising out of what was previously as much fun as changing a spark plug.

So there I am, without a care in a world, happily seeing that other people have been having much more fun than I have, when I’m face-to-face with a corpse.

I mean BAM! We’re talking a young lady that got knocked around quite a bit, and had been photographed from the neck up to show just exactly how knocked around she’d gotten. It was, as they say, “graphic”. And the eyes… oh, you don’t forget those eyes.

Suffice to say the part of the brain that is all into looking at porn is in a much different place than the one that is steeled for incoming harsh images. I never knew what hit me. I can still remember the feeling, like a cold iron rod got shoved into my gut and turned. I was totally open, totally floored, totally taken. I was a wreck.

For extra laughs, it was 2am and I was at work, since work at the time had the good net connection. There was no way I was in shape to leave my cubicle, much less go into the hallway and walk home in darkness. I was stuck, shaking, completely undergoing a panic attack.

The way I got myself out of this fine mess was to go onto the MUSH I was running, find someone not idle, and have me call him and talk on the phone for an hour. We talked about life, people, stuff.. just anything for me to hear a person’s voice, normally modulated, discussing anything but the truly horrible thing I’d seen. His name was Justin, and we still hang out every once in a while, ten years on.

So I know the effect this sort of shenanigan can have. Does that make it even worse? Maybe. I know that one of the arguments is that I don’t know what effect putting a “shock” image has on people, and then when they find out I do, the argument then becomes that my knowing the full effect of my actions makes me responsible.

Except one thing. I’m not on trial here. I’ve been on trial. This isn’t it.

A side-effect of the ease of browsing is that it can quickly lead to an ease of caring, too. Hit-and-run judgementalism. Drive-by sympathy. Love and compassion in a flimsy cup that dissipates as soon as you hit the “back” button. News stories are especially prone to this: you read how a guy did something horrible and then got caught, and this is the nearly-insignificant grit a group of people will use to form a stunning pearl of opinion to admire and show off between them. The guy is quickly forgotten, the circumstances never really explored. It’s about the idea of the moment, soon to be crumpled up and replaced with another target.

It’s fun to second-guess, backseat drive, armchair quarterback. It’s fun to throw out some speculative nib-nob in a one-line jest in between sips of coffee after having scanned the first 5 sentences of an essay or news story. But that’s not really conversation in the classic sense, that’s just having a nice time. And I am all for having a nice time, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t expect that a barrage of Opinion Tourists is going to make me go crazy over the deep meaning inherent in those claims of legal liability and moral fortitude. It’s background music playing in the soundtrack of my life. Treating it otherwise makes me into the sort of lightweight personality, constantly hitting “reload” to find his world worthiness, that I hope I never become.

But saying that…

At the end of a pulse wave of internet attention, that’s usually when you get a few nerd-come-latelys who take advantage of the slowdown to browse in, check if everyone’s eaten all the donuts, and then drop a little “meh” into the mix before moving on. After 5,000 “diggs” and tens of thousands of users, I saw this review go by:

“God this guy loves to hear himself type.”

And I have to say: Yes. Yes I do.

Goodnight.

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