ASCII by Jason Scott

The summary is this:

I am co-hosting a demoparty called BLOCKPARTY in Cleveland, Ohio at the end of April 2007. It will be an awful lot of fun and you should strongly consider attending. The website contains all the details you need.

The rest of this entry are my thoughts on this project, what the thinking is behind it, and why I hope people come to it and enter the competitions.

First of all, we get into the classic question, “What exactly do you mean by a ‘demoparty’?”.

Demoparties have a decades-old history, starting with “copy parties” that enabled home computer users to copy software easily, in person, avoiding long distance costs and saving time. Cracked games (which had their copy protection broken for easier/faster copying) featured “intro” or “crack” screens that told you what group or cracker had done the programming work to remove the protection. These intro screens started to take a life of their own until specific members of a cracking group were assigned just to make nice-looking introductions. From there, it blossomed. The copy parties started recognizing music and graphics quality with awards. Those awards eventually grew into competitions and contests of their own right, with the piracy angle diminished and eventually removed entirely.

These competitions, in fact, have grown to be quite impressive contests by any measure, with the entrants spending months and expending incredible talent to turn their presentations and programs into what can best be called mythical proportions. When an entry makes you question that your computer is actually creating what you see before you, you’re looking at the heart of what makes the demo scene (and demo parties) so compelling to those who enter and attend them.

The basic structure of what I’m calling a “demoparty” has been going on for some time: Lots of computer users congregate in one place. hauling their machines to that location, and then proceed to socialize and network into a little community of sorts before heading their separate ways. Naturally, there are a number of similar events where this happens: LAN Parties (gaming, mostly), hacker conventions, business conferences and so on.

Depending on who you are with computers and what you do, I’m either treading well-beaten paths explaining this or totally twisting your knowledge on its side. Let’s assume you’re either from the second group, or that you have a morbid curiosity as to why I would go through the trouble of organizing one of these things.

Demoparties are almost exclusively a European phenomenon. There have been events in other countries but they’re rare and dwarfed by both the size and frequency of the “euro” based parties. If you go to, for example, the nearly-canonical demoparty.net party tracking site, you’ll see that basically all the events are in Europe and how few fall outside. Why exactly is this the case? You can speculate about the differences in markets, in how computer events have been handled, or it might well and truly be an organic growth of what became LAN parties in the US going in a different direction overseas.

Either way, the result is that demoparties (or events that self-identify as such) in North America have been relatively few and far between. The largest by far was an event called the North American International Demoparty (NAID) which was held in 1995 and 1996 and had hundreds of attendees. They gave the sense of an amazing future of demoparties in North America, only to fizzle out after those two years. Others, with names like Coma, Crash, Pilgrimage and Spring Break, also tried to carry the torch but represented, in most cases, less than 100 attendees in total and often the only party held that year.

The torch of a North American demoparty in the post-2000 era has been carried by a graphics maven named Legalize, who wisely attempted to integrate the pioneering work in computer graphics technology and demoscene sensibilities. His Pilgrimage parties were successful, but attendance was lower than sometimes hoped for and organizing issues recently led to a last-minute cancellation and bad mojo all around. Regardless, his efforts are what spurred a renewed interest in trying to develop some of that demoscene magic within the confines of this continent.

In March of 2005 (yes, that long ago), I started discussing with RaD Man the idea of a possible Demoparty to be held in the United States, and the rough sketches of “Blockparty” was born. We registered demoparty.us and left it to the side while considering logistics. And logistics, as you might imagine, are always the biggest hurdle when assembling large groups of people (or trying to).

The biggest issue with putting together a demoparty is a venue and all the attendant arrangements involved in that. In most countries in Europe, there’s actually a pretty lax set of circumstances in arranging for events where people sleep over. In the US, it’s a little more complicated, and can involve insurance, liability, capacity planning and a host of other nightmares that an informal “gathering” might not want to deal with. So it made sense to us to ally with another conference being put on and then make Blockparty an “event” at that conference.

That conference is Notacon, which will now be in its fourth year and has worked out all those annoying infrastructure issues across the past few events, leaving the mostly “fun stuff” (assembling speakers and sponsors) for our sub-event within theirs. Anyone keeping track of my activities knows that I have gone to all the previous Notacons and have played some small-to-major role in them, giving speeches, doing a radio station, showing films and the like. I really consider it my “home” on the convention circuit and where I like to go that extra effort from the sidelines. It was, after some negotiations, a perfect match.

So now that we knew we were going to have a demoparty, we started working to add events, competitions and speakers to the party that people would want to come all the way to Cleveland to see and participate in. We are contacting folks, getting the word out, and updating the site as new information becomes available.

The events are concurrent, and it really is “Blockparty @ Notacon”, where we’re a sub-event going across Notacon’s three days and taking place in the same venue and at the same time. Purchasing tickets to Notacon gets you into Blockparty, and you get to see all the same stuff; no velvet ropes and no special passes needed. Notacon has more than enough to satisfy interest and be worth the trip, so you’re set there.

We therefore expect more cross-pollination, with people who have never been to anything like a demoparty being able to play a part in one for the first time. As more pieces fall into place, I expect we’re going to have a lot of questions, a lot of announcements, and a lot of interesting people coming into the mix.

If you’re concerned about this taking time away from my documentary work, don’t be. “Work is fractal”, as one of my mentors used to remind me, and I’ve been able to both give Blockparty the attention it needs while doing the same for my other projects. Trust me, I can swing it.

I hope you’ll consider attending. It really will be worth it to experience this new chapter in demoparty history; I’ll ensure that.

I’ll be announcing various bits of news on this weblog as I have with my documentaries, and the site itself will have announcements too. Keep an eye out, and wish us luck.

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OK! Back in February of 2006 I created an entry about five predictions I had for Wikipedia before the end of the year. It’s January 1st, and let’s see how I did.

The theme of the outcomes is “depending how you look at it”. While it’d be nice to claim I totally nailed things, I definitely didn’t, and what instead happened is even more interesting: Wikipedia twisted rules and bent procedures until some of the effective things I was trying to predict happened, but not the way I would have thought.

“Wikipedia will no longer allow anonymous edits of any kind.”

I got this one wrong. Anonymous edits are definitely still allowed on Wikipedia. What has instead happened concurrent to this is both an automatic skepticism of an anonymous edit compared to an edit by an account, and the creation of the “Semi-Protection” setting on articles which shut out anonymous edits on articles of controversy or undue attention, and adds an interesting (and arbitrary) 4-day waiting period on people who do register.

Anonymous editors are now a sub-class on Wikipedia whose contributions are to be used but who are not to really be trusted or listened to. Wales himself said as much when, during a discussion, he said “Sorry, but anon ip numbers do not have the same civil rights as logged in members of the community. If you want to be a good editor, get an account, make good edits. I really don’t care about your complaint as currently stated.” This is, essentially a capitulation to what editing on Wikipedia represents for anonymous users. So, like I said, you have the case that Anonymous editing is still allowed, but there’s a definite boxing-in of what anonymous editing is and how it’s considered and treated.

“Wikipedia will have to split off ‘user space’ from ‘Encyclopedia space’.”

Nope, User Space is still on Wikipedia. That said, there have been massive encroachments into what you may or may not do in that user space. Wikipedia has a procedure called Miscellany for Deletion which is the equivalent of a Homeowner’s Assocation for various pages including user pages. If you take the time to browse it, you’ll find people nosing into other folks’ User pages and calling for votes on whether the stuff the person has should be on Wikipedia. I still believe this one is going to happen, and I am all for it, but until then the uneasy balance about what a user page on Wikipedia should contain and how it should be on the site is still up for grabs.

Like a lot of other aspects of the site, there’s a lot of duct-tape solutions to overarching problems that can linger for some time and waste a lot of energy until it’s addressed. The finger-pointing wars over what’s “right” for a User page on Wikipedia are an example of this.

“Jimbo Wales will be either ousted or have his power curtailed relative to Wikipedia.”

I am effectively correct. While the shift of Jimbo from the lead of the Wikimedia Foundation to simply one of the members was both touted as big news and not big news at all, it represents a number of other similar moves that have diluted Wales’ direct influence over the project. I have seen a lot of his suggestions turned away. He has always coyly indicated that stuff happens without him really knowing about it, but that wasn’t strictly true; now it very much is. His new directions into the Wikia-related projects will dilute his influence even further.

I think he’ll speak “for” Wikipedia for some time to come, but in many ways, Steven Wozniak speaks “for” Apple although he has as much influence on the direction of Apple Computer as a minigolf windmill. The guy who shows up to all the events and the conferences is not often the guy who presses the big buttons in the boardroom. The word I think I’m looking to direct people to here is figurehead.

This all said, I believe he will still mount some kind of “assault” on the organization at some point in the future, where he’ll realize the ship has really gone in a way that “Captain Emeritus” doesn’t like and he will make a lot of noise to steer it “right”. I’m not really being all that psychic or anything; this is a natural step in the growth of a cult of personality.

“Wikipedia will make it almost impossible to edit entries on living people (or any entity that can sue).”

I was correct. There are two fronts to this conflict between the living and the dead on Wikipedia; the editing, and the office. In the case of the editing, pretty much every single article that cites a living person has this unfriendly statement in the discussion page: “This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material of any kind that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard. If you in fact go to the policy on editing biographies you are hit with a cascading set of rules about what you can do. While on the surface it might seem like good, responsible policy, in fact it’s merely because living people have called Wales’ cell phone and threatened to sue that motion has come forward on this policy, and the policy’s core concerns really represent concerns for every entry on Wikipedia. It’s just that “Periodic Table of the Elements” doesn’t threaten anyone over the phone or in a fax.

The second aspect is the front office. More and more, people from Wikimedia are going into entries, deleting them, and deleting evidence they ever existed, because someone made noise. Wales calls these “courtesy edits”. What they are is an acknowledgement that you can’t just swing Wikipedia’s bat around without hitting some legal representation in the face, and that putting biographies of living people up for worldwide anonymous editing is a recipe for disaster. I think this will continue.

“Wikipedia will add advertising (banner ads, text ads, or pop-ups).”

I was wrong because they found alternate ways to add advertising. I should have known that Wikipedia would continue to be the loss-leader while other methods would be used to generate cash off the content. For example, Answers.com licenses Wikipedia content from Wikipedia. (Here’s the Wikipedia entry on me on Answers.com, including ads). Answers.com makes cash off of the work of people on Wikipedia, then kickbacks to Wikipedia. Clever! And this Cisco ad uses Wikipedia in it and paid Wikimedia for the privilege. The result is the same, money coming in by licensing content created by others, but hey, that’s all part of the show.

So there we go, a pretty patchy set of outcomes for what I predicted 11 months ago. I’ll continue my occasional murmuring from the rooftops, and I’m sure Wikipedia will continue to enjoy its day in the sun.

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Here are some one-offs before the end of the year, for ideas or stuff that just doesn’t add up to a single entry. (In case anyone notices, I take the policy on here that I never post more than once a day, and I try to make each entry a complete self-contained idea, and worth spendig some time reading.)

I just found, buried on Youtube, someone’s remix of some clips from the BBS Documentary. Currently hosted on YouTube, this 10-minute remix has clips from BAUD and SYSOPS AND USERS, and gives a pretty nice feel for how my documentary episodes are like. I had nothing to do with it, and the Creative Commons license says there’s no problem with them doing it. And I’m saying there’s no problem with them doing it. Bravo.

If someone made an OS-Tan of textfiles.com, I would be the happiest bastard on the planet.

GET LAMP is coming along nicely; more details shortly.

BBS Documentary is still going out the door, too.

A good greeting to all the people kind enough to read this weblog, and I hope to see you in the new year.

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Sometimes, when I’m feeling down or depressed, I cheer myself up the way that most people would: by scanning in 20-year-old dot-matrix printouts, proofreading the resulting textfile for accuracy to the original, and then posting it for the world.

When I was calling BBSes in the early 1980s, I sometimes would print out the stuff I was reading. My IBM PC had an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer, and it could mostly keep up with whatever was coming off the modem. Looking back, I guess I considered it easier than saving to floppy disk. Maybe there was some other urge, but I can’t believe I thought it was an important historical record. I remember printing out some of my favorite messages from people I admired, so there was definitely a memento aspect about some of it.

(Astoundingly, Epson has gone back and scanned in all the documentation for the printers they used to sell, including the Epson FX-80 I used to own. Guess they’re saving history too.)

So, the upshot of this early-teenage activity is that I have over a ream of printouts of circa 1984-1985 BBS message bases and files. Many of the files I already have on textfiles.com, since I also saved them on the floppy disks I had. In this way, I know many of these files are “saved”; they’re online, mirrored in a dozen places I know of and probably a hundred I don’t.

Dot Matrix technology used a ribbon for printing and set up each letter in a little matrix of dots, hence the name. This means that the letters were really the lowest standard necessary to be legible. It was, really, worse than the typewriter-like printers that came before, but these were cheaper to get and they were, often, faster and smaller. They are also somewhat prone to fading, although a brand-new ribbon produced a printout that 20 years later still looks great.

I should also mention how hysterically loud this printer was, with each line going by like a banshee screaming. If you were running this printer late at night trying not to wake your dad, as I was, the issue was one of striking a balance between need-to-print and getting screamed at about being up at 3am. Therefore, these printouts hold a touch of bittersweetness for me, because they also invoke memories of my dad waking up at 6am, going out to the dining room and finding his eldest son still hunched over the computer, obviously having neither slept nor moved for the last 12 hours. I have a loud voice; my dad’s was even louder, and harsher, criticizing me for not sleeping and drawing the classic groggy parental logical bridges to deeper, darker ruin.

Bittersweet the memories might be, I kept all these printouts and over time, I’ve been scanning them in. OCR technology has gotten very good in the past few years, and a package like Omnipage will go through and nail something like 90-95% accuracy for a lot of these printouts. Occasionally it messes up when getting into particularly number-filled or technical documents, when it will start claiming something made in 1984 was made in 1934 and so on. Since it’s important to me to try and transfer this stuff as accurately as possible, I make sure to do a line-by-line comparison between the original printout and the resulting file, correcting poor character recognition and spacing, but ensuring that all the spelling mistakes, poor grammar and line noise stays in. After all, that’s what happened.

This is slow going and with a bunch of other stuff in my life it’s probablly got the worst effort-to-output ratio of all my projects, but it has definitely been progressing, and there’s a section on textfiles.com with the results of my work so far.

In some cases, these were relatively “large” boards, which meant there were hundreds of people logging on, but others were more likely to have a dozen or two dozen regular users. How many of those were pre-disposed to printing out or keeping record of the activity on the board, I wouldn’t know, but I’m willing to bet very few. So, the only record of these BBSes that might exist are these printouts.

So, if you’ll permit me, a quick tour.

For whatever reason, I was really attracted to a family of BBSes in the 612 area code, which meant (mostly) Minneapolis-based BBSes, and while I didn’t really know where Minneapolis (or Minnesota) was, I assumed it was a magical place because of all the cool messages people left. I was fascinated enough with this that I made a special effort to drive hundreds of miles during a trip to record these people for the BBS Documentary: Here’s some photos from that. For the record, it was quite worth it and these guys were as cool as I’d hoped.

Among the boards out there were the Safehouse BBS and the 1985 BBS. The Safehouse was a mastery of self-promotion – I even have the system specs up as a top 100 file. For an example of how the conversations might go, here’s a collection from the debate den. Initially, it seems a little hacked-together and simplistic, unless you take into consideration the whole context and start to string together the indirect information. For example, these 26 messages span the period from August 3, 1984 to September 10, 1984; five weeks of time, basically a new post every day and a half. And this was considered quite fine, with people responding to stuff posted weeks and weeks previously as if it’d just happened. Compare this to a site like fark.com where a subject will have its main burst of interest and posting within 8 hours, and include massive paragraphs of text, with people jumping into meta-discussion (“this is a stupid topic; people are falling into the same traps”) often in the first 20 minutes.

The 1985 is one of those perfect stories I like to tell. Started by Sinbad Sailor, it had 1985 as the last four digits of the number. It came up on January 1, 1985 and went down on December 31, 1985; it only lived an exact year, the year iit was named after, a fleeting party whose invitations were clear and which went down as expected, as it had always said it would. Here’s some general postings from the 1985 BBS and here’s a “random” sub-board which encouraged just being random.

I talk about the BBS Sherwood Forest II way too much, but it’s my all-time favorite BBS, because you really felt like you were running with the wolf pack and being in the know about stuff, which to a 14 year old is high currency indeed. Here’s some phone-phreak-related postings from Sherwood Forest II, which includes some informative postings by BIOC Agent 003, the crown jewel of Sherwood Forest II.

Another indirect advantage of this printing is catching some record, even a fleeting one, of BBSes that were likely to be created, live, and die within a month. It was hard work to keep one going and it was definitely expensive. Since you wanted people to call your new board, you would go to other BBSes and post messages about how great your place was and then sit back and hope beyond hope someone would actually call. Here’s a nice collection from the Utopia BBS (a personal favorite). Note how many times the sysops would not even leave the area code, assuming everyone would be in the same place (312) and there would be no long-distance callers.

Additionally, I even have the fortune of acquiring some rare gems along the way, for example this printout of messages from the Private Sector BBS, which was the “Official 2600 Magazine BBS” and was taken down by authorities a couple months after that printout.

Another gem is even more esoteric; a printout of a conference on Compuserve held in October of 1983 with Steven Wozniak. People (like myself) used to hearing the “good of all the world” type Woz in the modern day, as he happily talks about learning and doing the right thing, will find this conference transcription quite the contrast. Here, the Woz is all business, talking about the state of the market with the newly-released IBM PC jr coming out and the positioning of Apple’s IIe and III models against the Commodore 64. (Woz predicts the Commodore 64’s fading away after a year, but mostly because he believes a new model will subsume it, which was somewhat true). Additionally, he drops pearls of insight and information about the forthcoming Apple Macintosh, and how it will totally change everything. One of the most interesting passages concerns the dance that Wozniak enters into trying to skirt around the cold hard fact that the Macintosh is a billion times less “hackable” than the Apple II:

The Mac, unfortunately, is so perfect that we didn’t leave much room for
hackers to do hardware “for themselves” or “their own way” — we feel there
were no alternatives. The philosophy on software is different — open, access
the hardware at various levels. You won’t have the interesting world WE enjoy
of programming to handle each of five 80-column cards, six printer interface
cards, four dot-matrix printers and a letter-quality printer, four modem
cards, etc. The world of ones and zeroes, registers and adders, instruction
sets and video modes is very dear to many of us. We were forced to learn it
in order to be Apple II pioneers.

What’s vital to me, here, is that these are primary sources; these are examples of what it really was like to be on a BBS at that time, and are the actual words said by actual people who are a part of it. In today’s information-blender world, it’s frustrating to watch someone summarize the entire BBS era along some warped-for-the-current-argument vector. They do it because it’s easy, because who’s going to check up on that? But now, there’s these examples to point to, to go “No, we really didn’t think it was too slow. Yes, we really did talk this way. No, this term ‘open source’ didn’t pop up 20 years ago.” You hold in your hands what happened, when it happened.

I sometimes get side-swiped with one of the few arguments that will infuriate me, piffle about starving people in other lands or having a life or misjudging priorities. I’m pretty straightforward about these folks: I call them “death-dealers”. I call them that because they equate tearing down another project as building up their own. They consider telling someone they did things wrong to be equal to doing it right. At the end of the day they go into the ground and the world is made better by the silencing of their tinny horns.

I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t consider it important; and just glancing over the printouts, I take great satisfaction in bringing them onto the site. It’s rewarding work like few other projects I’ve done. This is what I do. You do what you do.

And there’s a part of me, giggling, that loves to scan these things in, carefully check them, and put them on the site because of the eternal cosmic joke behind it: for a while, people posting on these boards did think they were making the world a better or different place, and the weight of the words was, if not life-changing, at least highly regarded between the people posting and the people reading them. How hilarious, then, would it be for these kids, these teenagers, to know that 20 years hence, someone would labor to carefully transcribe their words, capturing every nuance, and then place it at personal expense up on a world-wide-accessible stage, for later generations to ponder!

If only life was this satisfying, on so many levels, all the time!

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I tried to use other means, but the name is in too much use and database searches don’t really help me lock things down. So here we go.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise that I am a Hell Roommate. Within a short time you figure out that you made a really bad mistake renting an apartment with me. In fact, after college I stopped living with anyone else and rented my own places except for a short interlude out of financial necessity that was, in its own way, also a disaster.

In the case of college, of course, you don’t have much choice in roommates, so the blazing hades of being my roommate was imposed upon, in order, Ben, Chris and Todd. Under “it seemed like a good idea at the time” we also have Mike, Scott, and (somewhat) John and Eric.

Todd was the longest-term college roommate, subjected to me for all of Freshman year at Emerson College. How he put up with me I’ll never know, and most markedly we ended up designing the absolute perfect layout for our dorm room, splitting up the bunk beds and arranging it so, if we wanted to, we could almost never see or hear each other.

He called himself “Ship”, played some basketball, and was going to Emerson for broadcast journalism and radio, with the intention of becoming a sports announcer. It is likely he dropped “Shapiro” later if he in fact went into that field. One side-effect of going to a school with such an entertainment bent is that a lot of people change their names professionally as needed. I mean, look at me, for example.

Anyway, so at one point, during a particularly gruesome fight, Todd said something that struck me enough that 18 years later I still remember it.

“You know, you better become fucking famous, so there’s something that made all this shit worth it.”

I’ve been in Wired, USA Today, the New York Times. I’ve been on NPR, on the CBC, and stuff I’ve written has been read by something in the range of many hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve had a film play on Comedy Central and Sundance. I’m in the IMDB, and I get the occasional fan mail.

I’m not A-list, B-list or even D-list, but in my little sphere, my little area I scoped out, I’m a celebrity.

I did my best, Todd!

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The more I collect stuff, and at this point I am collecting a virtual tidal wave of stuff, the more I am realizing how important the role of a guide is.

There are a lot of good people in this world, doing a lot of good work collecting stuff. And by “a lot”, I mean thousands and thousands. In many cases they’re classifying it. In many cases they’re classifying it, finding its context, and methodically making sure the “tags” and “scope” and “whatsis” and everything else is perfectly in place.

Color photographs from 1909-1912. 1,300 celebrity photographs taken over 30 years. Computer Gaming World. Glass Insulators. Bum Wines. Barbed wire. Hewlett-Packard Calculators.

We won, you know. When all this computer stuff started out, even nominally OK digitized and captured works were considered great. Even when the image was in fact crappy or the audio was crappy or the framerate was crappy, at the end of the day your computer could do something neat and you enjoyed it. And you hoped that over time people would create even more cool stuff and put it where you could get it. I won’t state a time when all this happened because it was different for different people.

But the fact is, we’re there! I get sent a lot of digitized material to accompany the in-the-UPS-box stuff that arrives on my doorstep regularly, and people are working to digitize stuff by the truckload. One of the things that held me back with digitize.textfiles.com is that a lot of things I might be inclined to scan in are being scanned in anyway. I’m probably going to scan in a bunch of rather obscure and semi-boring material, simply because I can know that nobody else is doing so. But already my collection is somewhat untenable and will need a little readjustment.

This is where a guide comes in. A lot of people knew about the DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM site, but it wasn’t until I talked in detail about what was so cool about the 1980 Coleco Catalog I’d digitized that people started hitting that particular exhibit with such fervor. In fact, I’m now the #1 hit for Coleco Catalog on Google. But the thing is, I’m not even the best scan of that catalog! A while later I found out that there was a site called the Handheld Museum that had not just scans of the catalog but links to information on all the games inside. Granted, it doesn’t have the FULL catalog, doesn’t have TIFFs available, but it’s still a very good work. Why am I the poobah and he’s the goat, search-engine-wise? Guides.

Without an advocate, there’s just so much stuff that you can’t possibly skim through it all, even to find the thing you want. In fact, you might not even know there’s stuff to skim through, or might not know that one pile is better than another pile.

A lot of my big hits come from Andy Baio, alias waxy, who functions as a very good guide for a lot of people. His link log is a beautiful stew of video, audio, news and ideas, with only the slightest commentary afterwards. I’ve watched comments from him result in world press interest in something on my weblog.

Same for BoingBoing. They can mention something that is 3 years old and cause a hurricaine of interest to knock over an unsuspecting server. For example, on December 13, 2006, which is the time this weblog entry was written, BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder linked to this page about the Schiebe Illusion, which is at least as old as May 24, 2004 (and links to a non-existent page on the home server, so it may be older than that). So this page sits around for two and a half years and then goes through the roof in terms of hits.

Is this bad? BoingBoing doesn’t make any claims their links are to new stuff, or cutting-edge, or even, really accurate. They just say “A Directory of Wonderful Things”. And heck, even if you’ve seen it a gabillion times before, some stuff never ends up being not-wonderful. But what they do is function as guides, which is why they stay popular, because ultimately, in the aggregate, they point you to some pretty cool stuff.

For most people nothing about this is a revelation; they already knew of a buddy or a website or other source that gave them better ideas of where to go. I’m just figuring out, however, that maybe a guide or advocate is not just a nice bonus but a critical part of archiving. Without someone giving context and sense and pointers, you’re likely going to miss out on a lot of cool stuff.

The issue with this is that the dark-mirror side of guides and advocates are Marketers and PR people, who are willing to put approval or demand attention for anything willing to give them a few bucks. And if it serves their purposes, they’ll act just like your buddy or get you to think they’re doing you a favor. I hate them; for example, check out these scumbags. Monetizing advocacy while giving the impression of it all being one big happy happenstance borders on a crime against humanity for me. At one point Creative Commons signed up with these losers, and the resulting shitstorm showed, pretty clearly, the division between the mindset of various people in that “movement”. So there’s a bit of a minefield to wanting guides; a lot of people want that “mindshare” of telling you what is interesting today, and that’s part of why BoingBoing’s front page looks like the lead vehicle in a NASCAR race.

Maybe I’ll put the call out for an official guide to my crap. Or maybe I’ll be that guy:

A much better catalog in the DIGITIZE collection is the 1983 Shelburne Holiday Catalog. It’s a treasure trove of late 1970s and early 1980s electronics design, intense language, and amazing claims. Go check that one out!

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Like any relatively sketchy activity, you learn “the rules” either by osmosis, logic, or the hard way. Your buddies involved in the same stuff as you will happily give you helpful advice, but they’re often just grasping into the same darkness as you. Such was the case with Phone Phreaking, which required the use of a telephone to do things, and which, therefore, could track you back to your telephone, and potentially your home, with an unknown amount of ease.

The convenience of phone hacking from home always struck up against the relative safety of phreaking from outside your home. In an ideal world, you didn’t use phreak codes from home, didn’t try to hack them from home, and didn’t really do anything from home. Life, however, is rarely ideal.

My compromise to this, especially in the more pressing situation of tying up my mother’s phone line, was to take over a telephone booth near my house in Brewster, NY, do all my stuff there, and then write down all my learned knowledge. This telephone booth came to be known in my mind as “The Office”.

The Office was pretty amazing as far as phone booths went in 1984; for one thing, it looked like it dated back to the 1950s, with a sort of art deco design and multi-colored paint job, not to mention the classy word TELEPHONE etched in a pretty font on each side. This was definitely not a standard Western Electric phone booth, and it wasn’t blue or adorned with a Bell Telephone logo anywhere on it. I have to assume that at some point in Brewster’s history, they had one of the independent telephone companies that hid under Ma Bell’s left buttcheek for a hundred years. This phone company was kind enough to place this quality telephone booth at an intersection that represented the crossroads between the towns of Brewster and Carmel, and it was all about 200 feet from my house.

As Cell phones dominate the world and phone booths are ripped out by the thousands each year, it will be harder and harder to really know that feeling of standing in one, especially if you were doing something illicit. In a full, glass-lined phone booth you are both encapsulated and vulnerable, most markedly at night, when you would be standing in what is essentially a lit square box that can others can see in but which you can’t see out. The booth had no sort of heating or air conditioning and so dead of winter or hottest summer day represented an unpleasant experience. These negative extremes were balanced by being inside during a heavy rain on a summer’s evening, when you could feel like a one-person capsule sheltered against the reality of the world. Most people these days are used to being able to sit in a car and conduct telecommunications without taking their hands off the steering wheel, and without (generally) being disconnected or asked to insert more money. Your car is mobile, yours, and subject to your whims. A telephone booth is none of these. Yet, in a strange way, I could start to feel like it really was mine, and that anyone who stopped into this gas station to make a phone call was using “my” office. It’s OK, I understood and didn’t raise a fuss.

I’d stand in The Office late at night, in the afternoon, or even the occasional morning, checking on my voice mailbox, dialing people who I wanted to talk to but didn’t want to get in trouble if they did, and always looking for new codes or numbers to try out. If it could be reached by a phone, it could be reached by a payphone; the tricks now in place to prevent access were not enforced then, and you’d get the occasional busy-out signal trying a weird 0-700 or other bizarre number, but these were exceedingly rare. With a tiny shelf inside the booth, I had a place to put my notebooks or pieces of paper and write out grids for scanning telephone exchanges.or lists of 976 numbers. (Both of these came from my time in The Office).

You can see the intersection on this map, and if you scroll up, you can see where my house was. Not too bad, in terms of distance. The pile of cars is what was a service station and The Office was in the parking lot directly south.

I say “was” because after I moved away, some entity took away The Office. I came by years later to see what had happened to my old neighborhood, and The Office was gone. Not replaced with something new; literally a slab of concrete where I had spent hundreds of hours of my teenage years. History, wiped. I never even thought to get a photo.

The Office had nothing around it but the two gas stations and a very busy road. It wasn’t leaning against anything, wasn’t under an overpass or covered with stickers from a nearby venue. It was its own thing, a classy, self-contained room that a young fellow spent his youth wiling away the hours in, trying beyond all reason to be somebody different, somebody more powerful, a unique force at an age when you feel anything but. All hangouts are places where someone goes to be themselves; mine just happened to take up 9 square feet of space.

It was a refuge against the crushing boredom of a teenager. It served me well, and protected me. I thank The Office for the part it played in my life.

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I spent a week in London at the beginning of this month. This contributed to lack of updates here and a few other things being pushed temporarily aside. But I’m back, I took a lot of photos, and I had a very good time. I never left the confines of London, so I don’t consider England “done” by any stretch of the imagination, but this was the first time I’d ever travelled over the Atlantic, and it was an excellent first step.

I was in London to present a speech about Wikipedia. Being flown to London and put up in a hotel is not something I normally have happen to me, so I jumped at the opportunity. The event was called the STM Innovations Seminar. STM stands for “Scientific, Technical and Medical”, as in publishing. So what we have here was me being able to punch Wikipedia in the face for a little under an hour, while visiting another country. Who could resist? I was also the lead-in to Ted Nelson, he of Xanadu and pioneering work in hypertext, and who could resist that. So all around, a great way to spend a week.

I’ve now put a copy of the speech, “Mythapedia”, on archive.org. If you’ve already heard The Great Failure of Wikipedia the tone and approach will be somewhat similar, although this one is focused more towards addressing Wikipedia from the point of view of a publisher and a number of my beliefs of what a Wikipedia-like entity needs to sustain quality work.

Naturally, GET LAMP benefitted from this trip as well, as I was able to interview four people for the forthcoming documentary, including game guru Ernest Adams and MUD creator Richard Bartle.

Ernest Adams was particularly friendly and helpful when I plugged my power strip into the wall and blew it up (turns out it was cut-rate; now it’s a plastic paperweight). I also discovered that while my lamps are 120-240v, the bulbs were definitely not; we had to go on a quick shopping spree to buy new halogen bulbs. A minor annoyance, but Mr. Adams was very nice about the whole delay, and ultimately we got a great interview down.

I got a lot of flack for not having more non-North American interviews for the BBS Documentary, and this is why: all the little issues of power, of transiting equipment, of getting transport when in a country… at the time I was working on BBS, it was just too much to pile on to everything else. I think I made the right choice, although it does sting a bit when the insults come in about making it.

Between taking my trips in double decker busses and the tube, eating bangers and mash, and walking miles and miles just taking in the place, I got to go to the GAME ON exhibit at the Science Museum. The thing is, I have a lot of what they have in my basement, with the usual exceptions of a PDP-1 and those first really funky Computer Space arcade machines. It was nice to see they had a exhibit running a text adventure (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Infocom, 1984). ot a jazzed-up one, just the good ol’ text and prompt, waiting for the next move. And people were checking it out!

Life, in other words, is good.

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Like a lot of teenagers, I had voicemail. That is, like a lot of teenagers now. But I had voicemail in 1984.

This came about because a kind soul posted a phone number to a voice mail system in Washington DC. I knew it was Washington DC because the area code was 202 and by thirteen I’d memorized all the area codes. You did that sort of thing when you were using phone codes, since you were then calling so many different states and provinces you simply had to. 404? Georgia. 617? Massachusetts. 415? California. I could rattle them off like my own phone number. “Give me an area code” was an occasional but always fun game, although winning it was kind of an empty victory.

I knew the voice mail system was in Washington, but that was about it. In this particular case, each mailbox got its own phone number on the private branch exchange (PBX). That is, when you called a number, you got a single person, no indication of what company, and you could leave a message. And, like many companies with a new PBX, this company set a default password on all the accounts. I don’t think it was 1234 but it very well might have been. With a few random dials, I got a phone number (really, an extension) to try out, put in the default password, and I was in. Wily hacker, indeed. A quick change to the password, a new incoming message, and here I was, just thirteen, with a slick way for people to reach me.

I hadn’t found the number. The message from whoever gave the number had hints on how to get a voicemail box on it. But still, I’d done it, I’d gotten my piece, and I was one proud bastard. With my street-cred 202 number, I logged onto BBSes and posted like I usually did, except now I mentioned people could “call my box”. Make a little pistol-shooting gesture with your hand and wink. That was me.

Some of the BBSes I posted on included a board in New Jersey called the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and a board out in Minnesota called the Safehouse.. Like the rest, I invited folks to call my box and leave messages. I then checked my box faithfully, several times a day.

Messages started trickling in. People checking out the system. Kids fascinated you could press keys and make this “computer” do stuff. People screwing around, leaving profanity or sounds. Even kids breathing in while talking, trying to get around any voice printing that might be going on. Many of them called me “Alan” and this confused me, until I realized the “short name” setting still told people the “old” owner of the box, whose name was Alan. (I then went in and fixed this as well.)

Amazingly, this thing impressed people. Kids called and offered me “elite” access. People called me (not the service) cool for doing this. And one kid thanked me for specifically making the BBS I’d logged onto cool by posting this information.

His handle was Machiavelli, and he was on The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (also known as Milliways BBS). This message, plus the charm of the BBS, kept me calling back. A lot. And over time, my personality and style won me points with the sysop, Outland, whose real name was Jim. He offered me a co-sysop position, my first, and from there my love of BBSes grew even more than it already was. My times with Jim and the Milliways BBS will fill an entry of their own someday. And I owe it all to my voice mailbox.

Being who I am, I recorded all of these messages using an induction microphone and saved them for history.
Why, here they are in this directory.

Cell phones, it has to be stressed, were a dream for even the most well-off kids. They were such a premium that I remember how places would sell fake plastic cell phone attennas that you could attach to your car and fool people into thinking you were more connected and classy than you were. And I certainly wasn’t going to be giving out my home phone number to people I didn’t know to discuss software trades or shared phone information. My box solved all this. Just reach me on my 202 number, I’d say, and I’ll check it and call you back.

By the age of 14, I was already using the box like people use them today on their phones; to store cool messages, to leave notes to myself, and to test out new phone codes. Naturally, codes would sometimes be scarce and I’d pay the money to call. It cost a bit, but it was worth it, if just to pick up my messages and get back to people. Non-local calls were still a wallet-breaker for the population, but I was quite happy with my hundreds-of-miles distant voicemail and telling people they “knew what to do”.

Stolen voicemail boxes, of course, were short-lived at best. Like anything swiped away but still running at someone’s place of business, it was inevitable that the hoisted number would be found out and the box shut off, or recoded and all the messages deleted. It was the price of doing business, of getting for free what others were paying hundreds of dollars a year for.

But here’s the weird part: My voicemail lasted for five years.

From when I was 13 to when I was about 19, I had this box. That’s a long, long time by any stretch, but by hacked voicemail standards it was Highlander-class immortality. In those five years, I changed schools, got new friends, started my own BBS, had a lot of laughs, a lot of good times, and a lot of sad times. But I always had that box.

In fact, I can remember where I was standing, what phone booth near what diner in what town, when I called my box to check messages, and got the error.

The error said I had the wrong password. But that couldn’t be. I knew this box by heart; I could call the whole thing without even looking at the phone dial (and often did). So I hung up and tried again.

I remember the grey day, I remember the rain drizzling across the street and against the booth when I realized my box, my little teenage piece of the phone system, was gone forever.

I even remember, strangely, what I said at the phone as I hung up the handset and left my childhood toy behind:

“Thanks”.

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Some time ago, I talked about a theater on the way out, in an entry called The Little Theater. I talked about how they didn’t own their property, didn’t have a lobby to speak of, had basically taken the idea they were a utility and then turned around and demanded a million dollars from the world so they could go on. It was quite a negative entry, and I had no proof my opinions were relevant.

Let me correct all that by telling you about The Big Picture.

While travelling through Vermont to do a couple of interviews for GET LAMP, I found myself with a little extra time. I drove around the countryside near Waitsfield, Vermont (near the Mad River) and saw that there was a movie theater near the main road. I drove down to investigate, just to see what sort of place it might be, and what sort of stuff they might be showing.

The Big Picture might look kind of like a weird house out in the middle of a field near a lot, but coming closer, you start to see the interesting way it was built; hints of art deco, pretty lighting, and a functioning clock telling you of the next showings. Its marquee is clean, bright, and distinct. It invites you in.

Once inside, however, you’re in for a real treat.

Some modern theaters might have a dingy, anaemic lobby that wants nothing more than to shuffle you past a selection of overpriced candy to get into the film box, or provide a gymnasium-sized impersonal box covered with ads for whoever paid the big nickel that week. But The Big Picture has an expansive, windowed lobby that offers not only ice cream, candy and soda, but has an entire sit-down bar and restaurant coated in beautiful hardwoods and soft lighting worthy of a classy bookstore. Before you even decide to walk down the hallway to one of the two actual theaters, you’ve already got a variety of activities you could do, whether it be to have a pre-film meal or enjoy a couple of drinks while talking with your friends in the comfortable leather couches and chairs.

I don’t drink, but I’m not the average person, and the average person would definitely love a place that lets you enjoy a good beer or wine and some snacks before making your way into the plush theatres for your films. Some might think this is all window dressing, but it’s not. It sets the stage for enjoying a film, and enjoying the company of others. You could come down early, have a meal, talk with friends or make new ones, and then make your way leisurely into the screens and enjoy a good show. In a world fighting rooms with big screen TVs, this is a heady defense against them; providing a place that’s worth not being alone in. Oh there’s free Internet.

Of course, this is all secondary to content, and what the theatre might have to show. This past weekend was “Movie Lover’s Week” and I took a shot of what was in store.

Delicatessen! !Enter the Dragon! Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown! Thai Chi Master! Run Lola Run!
Kung Fu Hustle! The Eel! The Drunken Master! Karate Kid! The Gods Must be Crazy! If you can’t find something in the lineup that played across just the last weekend, tell me where to send the flowers, because you died.

Just browsing the website for this theatre shows the care that’s gone into putting stuff together. Not only are there specials for “dinner and a movie”, but you have the choice of brunches, and a special kids/parents night out on Wednesdays. But what’s this? A speaker?

I had struck up a conversation with the owner, a real great lady, and she showed me the two theaters. One of them had a lot (and I mean a lot) of space up front, more than adequate for someone to put on a sock hop or a game of dodgeball. She said they’d had bands, presenters, and a whole other range of activities in there. Glancing at the website, you can see the forthcoming appearance of Scott Ritter, who was a UN Weapons Inspector from 1991-1998. Yes, in person. At this theatre.

If I was a kid living in the surrounding area of Waitsfield, Vermont, it’d all be here: mom taking me to great movies in the middle of the week, and me seeing cooler and cooler stuff with all my friends, hanging down at the Big Picture as I got older, watching all these great movies I’d never heard of, and maybe when I got to a certain age, even being brought or going myself to hear a speaker talking about something of world import, right here in my town of about 6,000. Not a bad childhood at all.

I spent some time talking with the owner, who owns the land and the building (hooray) and told me about the effort put into making the place great. The events, the arranging, the billion little details in keeping a concern like this going. The surrounding area isn’t heavily populated, but she’d renovated the place to be what a modern theatre should be: a destination, not just a way-station on the way to somewhere else. Truly a charming (and smart) lady.

If you live within a hundred miles of this place, it’s worth the trip, a full day you could spend enjoying yourself and seeing movies in a way they’re meant to be seen.

It can be done. A theatre in the modern age of plasma and THX in the home can survive, thrive, and give you something you can’t get 20 feet from your bathroom. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I hope I see it in Waitsfield (and many other places) for decades to come.

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