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ASCII BY JASON SCOTT

Jason Scott's Weblog


DISCORD, OR THE DEATH OF LORE — MARCH 6, 2023

I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long
time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold
the heft and halter, the one standing at the death of all things, and while it
means a lot of moments of rescue and recovery, it also means knowing, looking
across at that which thrives and bustles, the desiccation and destruction to
come. The only part of the fog of the future that’s guaranteed is the moment it
switches from theory to a wall of iron and then darkness.

All this to say: Discord.

Twitter, in its own death throes, its own misery, will always stand in its later
years as a fantastic tool for raining down misery and pain on others with a
simple “quote tweet”, and I’ve been guilty of such on the absolute regular. Few
of my tweets maneuvered past 100,000 “impressions”, but this one most definitely
did:



The last I checked, that tweet got the attention of over a quarter-million
individuals and/or machines, and the next two follow-ups got a smaller amount,
but are still worth noting:



There is absolutely nothing new about Discord, say people with experience of
IRC. Of course, they’re wrong: Discord has speed, ease of use, and (at this
point in time) general societal acceptance far beyond IRC. IRC is a bouncer
looking you up and down and asking you to do a small dance of proof of worth
before entering a text-only cave of obscurity; Discord added skylights, pretty
lights, cross-platform access and verification, and centralization, not all of
them great additions but very welcome for their intended audience…. who is now
everyone.

I’ve been on well over 100 discords, and I’ve run or in some way moderated a
half-dozen. They’re good for fast spinning-up of projects, to glom a bunch of
humans into a channel system, and not have to deal with Slack’s oddities, or the
ridiculous on-ramp for IRC. At one point I asked for people to send me invites
to the weirdest Discords they were members of, and I can assure you, there’s
weird ones indeed. And the capacity is notable – walking through the halls of
particularly “hot” Discords with literally hundreds of thousands of members,
especially when active, is to walk through a space station hosting an all-star
concert as it blasts through the darkness.

I have no disputes as the popularity of the places, the things that happen
there, and the unquestioned vivaciousness of being the party that never seems to
end and everyone wants to join.

I just happen to be the sort of person who notices there’s no decent fire exits
and most of the structure is wood and there’s an… awful lot of pyrotechnics
being set off.

Discord’s official birthday is 2012, but it’s really 2009, when OpenFeint was
created.



OpenFeint is the pile of bones worn into the foundation of Discord telling us it
was built on land that will very occasionally flood to great catastrophe. It was
founded in 2009, was given a huge ecosystem of plugins and support, gained ten
million followers, took in roughly $12 million of known VC investment, was sold
to a Japanese company in 2011 for $104 million, and was fucking dead in the
ground by 2012. By the flickering light of its Viking funeral, Discord was
founded and the cycle began anew.

Spare me the “they learned their lesson speech”, and please store it in this
garbage can I’ve already stuffed with the “it won’t happen again” and “you don’t
know what you’re talking about” bags I tend to get. It will happen again; it’s
just a matter of when.

The main considerations I have are what will be lost.



When the free image-hosting site ImageShack made the realization that they were
losing buckets of money hosting images for free, and shifted over to a
subscription model that also cut off legacy accounts, deleting them in fact, the
question was who would care. Perhaps the original uploaders of the images, too
cheap to pay the additional fees of a few bucks per month, or maybe someone who
took amusement from this image or that, but probably had downloaded it anyway?

No, what this did was decimate warehouses of lore.

It turns out, in the breadth of time, ImageShack was the unofficial official
clearinghouse of diagrams and illustrations of web discussion boards that had
limits (or difficulties) hosting images. Sure, most of the boards had software
that allowed you to upload to them, but ImageShack was very easy to host with,
and the results were fast and simple and could be rather large when needed. This
was very helpful for technical diagrams and explanations that would cover (at
the time) larger resolutions of graphic information.

So, when ImageShack killed what had been 13 years of these illustrations, they
definitely probably saved the business, and they ensured everyone who was
hosting with them was truly engaged, but they also lobotomized hundreds,
possibly thousands of forums and discussion groups and absolutely wiped an
entire collection of reference documents from the web at the same time. Walking
through some of them (before they, themselves, died) was walking through a
bombed city, its institutional and cultural memory pockmarked with “pay us to
see this stuff” placeholders.

Documents are documents. Books are books, recordings are recordings, and so on.
As time has gone on, though, I’ve observed the probably obvious-to-others fact
that Lore is the grease between the concrete blocks of knowledge, the carved
step in an otherwise impossible-to-scale mountain, the small bit of powder
sprinkled through a workspace to ensure sparks don’t fly and things don’t burn.
Inconceivably odd to the outsider, but vital to the dedicated or intense
practice of the craft.

Certainly, the ideal situation is lore is inlaid into a framework of knowledge.
As the joke goes, there’s no real conflict between herbs and medicine – we took
herbs and the ones that worked became medicine. In the same way, the lore of
knots became the rules of the sea and the lore of practiced building that was
vital to share across long distances of time and space became engineering. This
is an overly simplistic view, but it holds true that “lore” joins “knowledge” in
a very haphazard fashion, usually relying on someone so driven to push the
process that they create a 400 page behemoth of writing that is gleaned by
social calls and favors into the story of How It Has Been Done.



The danger in this process, the potential lost ballast in the rise to the skies,
is that the lore-to-knowledge transfer is lossy, messy, and arbitrary. Maybe
those in the know want to keep the information to themselves, so it won’t be
given to whoever the person or persons are who are laying down the written form.
Maybe the chronicler of information has blind spots they don’t know about and
not enough people to correct them. Or, more likely, you have to set the “noise
filter” of the information to not go down the rabbit and rat holes of
contingencies that maybe a dozen or two people will even want to know about, to
the favor of that which everyone will need. The outcome is always the same: Lore
loses in the long run.

I’ll take a quick diversion to say that we do see attempts to whip lore into
shape on a shared basis, be it Quora, Yahoo! Answers, Reddit and Stack Overflow
– all of them centralized entities, some of them better than others, and all of
them fundamentally unstructured compared to a “book” form factor but infinitely
searchable and fungible to the needs of whoever is wandering in, even if they
must know three-quarters of the solution to get the actual final part.

Discord, in the decade and change it has lived, and especially once it took off
beyond its initial social and classification groups, has exploded exponentially
in all the parts it plays on the remnants of the Web. Time and again, we see a
Discord rise that represents a subject general or specific, a grouping of dozens
or hundreds of folks interested or entangled in the subject, and then a massive
growth of channels and direct messages rising from that clumped “community”.
Some of the results are droll mostly-silent channels with occasional flares of
conversations, while others are waterfalls of discussion and write-once
read-never rants and dumb questions, punctuated with someone asking a question
for the hundredth time and someone answering a different way.

There are more Discords than you realize, and more lore pouring into them than
anyone can truly comprehend. They are not the exclusive spigots of lore but
they’re a major pipeline, a notable artery on Knowledge’s Heart that we would
definitely notice if, for whatever reason, it was clogged with Mission Shift or
New Opportunities cutting it off.

The two-line discussion at the center of my first public lambasting of Discord’s
nature is telling, not because of the individual who responded as they did, but
the situation they were unintentionally highlighting:



EmoSaru is not evil or a paragon of Knowledge’s Destruction; they’re a
shopkeeper noticing that fresh tomatoes aren’t selling as well as ketchup and
ketchup is cheaper to keep on the shelves and lasts longer, and everyone who
might come along and complain about losing fresh tomatoes aren’t buying said
beloved tomatoes. They’re following the wind. Only fools stay in the field when
the herd has gone in from the rain. I highlighted them just because the exchange
was, as they say, el perfecto.

My grandmother would always scold me, lightly of course, about my cartoons I’d
draw on paper because I wouldn’t use both sides of the page; my personal belief
that it would bleed into each other wasn’t part of the argument, just that she
had long memories of doing without and making do with little and she wanted me
to not waste the (temporary) bounty before the next (inevitable) hardship.

To that end, I am, again, the angel-winged herald of the Death of Discord and I
only wish to highlight what might blunt the pain of the inevitable decay and
destruction of what it is.



In the unlikely event that Discord sits across from me at a table and asks What
Exactly Do You Want To Leave Us Alone, my list of demands is both logical and
impossible:

 * Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know
   that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the
   moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they
   get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and
   there’s a bunch of them.
 * Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file,
   like JSON or any other text format. Hell, make it a feature for “Discord
   Nitro“, which is obviously a part of the “oh crap, we need to prove we can
   make money with this thing” phase of the cycle you’re now entering.
 * At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does
   a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of
   knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from
   everyone who ever touched a server.

The unlikely event of them sitting with me across a table is doubly joined by
the unlikely event they would implement anything like I’m asking for.

Consider this me walking through and pointing out the wood structure and lack of
fire exits, and if someone did the work, even if it cost a little extra, a lot
of people will be a little less sad down the line.

And when the inevitable does its inevitable thing, maybe we can all sit down and
talk about what could have been.

…just not on Discord.

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11 Comments


THE GRIND A DAY — MARCH 5, 2023

4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on
tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of
how the unique floppy disk system worked, how it could be manipulated, and then,
ultimately, how legions of companies and individuals used those manipulations to
“protect” commercial software.

Left to just that level of knowledge, this would store 4am in the cattle car of
all the people I know of and deal with on a frequent basis. They’re the reason
so many people know the penguin gets fat on the second run-through of Mario 64,
or that what a fast-load cartridge actually does for a Commodore 64. Maybe not
enough, probably too much.

But 4am is an engineer, and also a documentation writer, and also the
aforementioned resister of dumb and deja vu, so not only did we end up with
examples of crack writeups that rival a 1930s pulp story for adventures and
twists, but also a series of increasingly complex and intense tools for the
simple goal of removing the protection from Apple II software.

Somewhere in the middle of this journey, now well into the realm of a decade,
came John Keoni Morris and Applesauce, itself an overengineered-for-the-purpose
multi-tool that started with doing flux readings of Apple-only floppies and then
expanded out into masses of other related systems and setups, and all allowing
us to be broken free from chains.



To my great delight, the two creators of these projects don’t entirely hate each
other, and share very similar goals, and listen to each other within reason.

The result is that years in, there are literally thousands of floppy disks that
are definitively captured digitally, remixed or presented as packs of files, and
offered without crushing pre-requisites or unseen gatekeeping. It’s all just…
happening. If you’ve not paid attention (and you are quite welcome to not have
been doing so) let me assure you that Apple II disk preservation has been flying
at a speed and quality that almost no other platform enjoys, except Commodore
64, and C64’s surpassing comprehensiveness has come at great unpleasant costs.

As collections and piles of floppies have turned up, an amateur army of
Applesauce owners (including 4am) have absorbed these plastic squares and turned
them into files, literally rescuing them from oblivion. The to-be-expected
reserves have been exhausted years ago, and we’re in the realm of the rare, the
newly discovered, and the open hailing frequencies letting previously-unaware
people know there’s a home for their boxes of floppies to be turned digital from
the merely magnetic.



This all to say, the result of this set of happy accidents and personalities
combined with the strange alure of this commercial computer platform and the
relative sturdiness of the engineering has resulted in a renaissance of access
to the old software. My small contribution has been to ensure that the old
software has a permanent-as-possible home.

4am, however, rises to the top again and again.

Sitting at the Internet Archive, is the 4AM Collection, an Apple II collection
of cracked software (cracked “silently”, meaning no title screens or destruction
of function in the name of getting it out the doors), that numbers past 3,000
individual titles. And because we have an emulation system in place, you can
click on almost all of them and begin interacting with them immediately, often
instantly.

The pure existence of this collection, that it actually works and is available
all the time and people use it by the thousands, also stands as a perfect
example of what I’ve come to realize: Accomplishments fade, to the accomplished.
People who are in the business of getting things done take very little time to
wander out to the veranda to look down among their completed tasks and not move,
quietly jiggling a beverage. They’re back inside working on the next thing, or
trying to shore up a devastating (to them) flaw in their work they glanced at
the last time they ever looked back at it.

Meanwhile, this collection (still growing) represents a foundational location to
some audience, the size of which I can’t easily discern, who are just living in
a world where thousands of Apple II software packages are ready to go at the
slightest itch to make it happen.

The use of Passport and Applesauce means that when 4am gets new floppies, either
by purchase or donation, they enter a well-oiled machine and process, which
reads the disks, cracks them (or asks for help cracking them, before they are
then cracked and everything else like them will be cracked in the future), and
uploads the new ones to the Archive. There’s a lot less time to get bored, find
it repetitive, and get a hold of the inevitable excuses to do anything else.

There’s lessons in all this but I’m not convinced they’ll reach the right
people.



Speaking of lessons, the point of all this congratulatory fog of words is to
bring out a hard lesson I learned due to a secondary 4am project: WOZ A DAY.

Applesauce pushes out three general types of disk images in its work. Fluxes,
which are to-the-bit accurate portrayals of the magnetic flux of the floppy
disks. Files that are just the data inside the floppies, and a third type, WOZ
format.

Flux reads are huge, owing to how they’re being done, and can be 20 megabytes
for a single floppy which would normally be 144 kilobytes. The files of JUST the
data are usually the exact same, that is, 144 kilobyes.

But WOZ files are another beast all together. They shift; they are different
sizes for the different unique aspects of that floppy disk images. WOZ, in other
words, is a standard disk image but with an entire additional layer of
information about the layout of the floppies and additional data shoved into
them for the purposes of copy projection.

In the context of the end user, a WOZ file, booting inside a WOZ-enabled
emulator, will boot with not a single solitary byte changed in the name of
preservation, or a single solitary microsecond mistimed in execution and speed
from the original hardware booking the original magnetic black square.

If you start up Choplifter! as a WOZ, you will experience Choplifter! exactly as
you’d have booting something you picked up at the local computer store. For
people who might have only played cracked versions, modified towards being
copyable and easily transferred over modems, it might sometimes come off as the
program being “wrong”. But no, it is you who is at fault; you remember something
else, a simulacrum of what Choplifter was at the time.



The aforementioned process and automation on the part of 4am has resulted in
WOZ-A-DAY holding over 1,500 individual commercially released programs in its
collection. This number is astounding; for most individuals with a glancing and
maybe even deep knowledge of Apple II software lore, they will be very hard
pressed indeed to recall any program they bought in a store (or wished they
had), or to find any commercial product advertised inside a magazine, and not
bump into it among the hundreds contained here.

It is among the high crimes within my personal penal code when someone hears
tangentially of a major project like this, spanning years, and coming back with
“Well, call me when they have ______” without even checking, thinking they’ve
added anything of value to the discussion. What they generally have done is
withdraw another 15-45 seconds of my life to tell them that yes, this collection
has Prince of Persia, Apple Galaxian, or Copy II Plus among its stacks. It has
so many more, not just games but utilities, applications, educational and genres
yet undefined.

Walking these exhibits myself, as I’ve done over the years, it feels like we’re
looking at both a memorial and a testimony condensed into an object. After all,
to know how amazing a game like Dung Beetles is, and being able to point to that
specific URL to instantly play it, seems like a high watermark. It shouldn’t
just be a simple case of the name and year of the program and then you play it –
surely we can do more.

Already, WOZ A DAY and the other 4am collections stand as the kind of puffery
discussed at a game convention or around a table on the second day of a tech
meet, a wishful thinking of “someday” that could exist. I’ve sat in on those
conversations, and yet here, absolutely, is the real thing.

But it’s thin. You are told a game exists here, you can click on it and play it.
You do not get context, documentation, links to magazine articles and ads and
all the other pieces of a program’s life that came through the world as it was
sold.

Worst of all, the Internet Archive is absolutely brimming with the information
I’m talking about – digitized magazines, flyers, books and recordings discussing
these very items.

So, at one point, I decided it was time to do something about it.

It failed and I wanted to talk about why.

To understand what I was going for, I put in the time for Hard Hat Mack, a
pretty straightforward platformer game from 1983, which has gotten the WOZ A DAY
treatment. I spent time and tried to pull up everything about this game –
write-ups, interviews, reviews, announcements, alternate versions and trivia. I
created an item that would reveal Hard Hat Mack’s full spectrum of information
and allow someone who played the game to also enjoy the world it was part of.
Or, conversely, for a student or researcher to grab footholds in the history of
the game.

If this sub-project started and ended with a handful of items, it’d be a
success.

But there’s a lot of items.

After spending some weeks rounding up people to contribute entries in the same
style of depth, tracking contributions and sharing the duties, only a handful
ever got the treatment. I have mostly shut the whole thing down at this point.



So, what exactly happened?

Well, it comes down to a rather tricky situation – there are jobs/tasks that
will only bring in fanatics if by fanatics you mean people being paid for their
time. And those jobs/tasks will likely never get any sort of funding to do so.

They’re the worst of both worlds – profoundly boring, utterly necessary. No
amount of rah-rah work, no reframing of the whole thing as a competition, “do it
for the good of it” situation will obscure the fact that it is very difficult
effort that should be compensated.

4am happened upon the secret – write code to do the boring parts, then make more
and more parts boring; figure them out utterly, until there were no choices to
make, and then code that followed those no-choice journeys thousands of times.
But rich, interesting descriptions and lists of tangents are not the province of
automation, yet, and so the WOZ A DAY remains as, simply, a spectacular
selection of Apple II software, much of it rare as can be in the form it exists.

I could cook up some other schemes to get an army of people to do this work –
fundraisers, “hackathons” and livestreams come to mind. But at the moment,
things are stable, and I tried to do the experiment and have a lot of data about
what worked and didn’t work in the process. We got a handful of nice items
updated with their history, and I learned a lesson.

Maybe, sometimes, we take the lesson, and move on.

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4 Comments


PRIORITY AND PROCESS — FEBRUARY 13, 2023

The reason I’m doing a bunch of entries around the theme of “A couple people
asked, so here’s a long and drawn-out answer that touches on a host of
considerations” is because the era of “I am on multiple platforms that harvest
my low-level brainwaves and let me make two-sentence jabs masquerading as
insight” is coming to a close. In its dimming light, I can make out the glow of
people wanting to know some of the opaque processes I engage in, either as
inspiration or a warning.

That approach (one focus drains, another rises) is the core of how I do
everything, so let me answer the curiosity of a few people who wondered why I
choose what I do and how I do it.

The usual caveats: One person’s approach to life, especially as described by
themselves, is an observed artwork, not a curated manual. Priorities shift and
opportunities flicker and fade, and it’s not a good idea to have made your
priorities or opportunities the defining (or worse, only) aspects of your life.
In a year I could read all this and laugh at that deluded bastard, unaware of
the Coming Thing that will make any of it irrelevant. Consider this all a gentle
introspective song played in words and not a thundering drumbeat demanding you
march in lock step.

I am also focusing on my Internet Archive era, not how I approached things back
when I was a systems administrator and doing documentaries on the side, that is,
a documentary filmmaker who administered systems to pay his travel and camera
equipment costs. I’m talking about 2011 to the present.

With all that out of the way.

On a personal level, I’ve been speedrunning a game called “Die With The Least
Amount Of Confusion About What To Do With Your Remaining Stuff”, and
professionally, I’ve been running a project called “Die With Maximum Finished
Projects Lacking Interest By Co-Workers And Reasonable Public Levels of
Awareness Of My Efforts”. Both are going quite swimmingly.

It’s bright-line obvious and easy to cleave my Internet Archive era into before
and after my 2017 heart attack.

I’ve described the situation at length before, even doing so onstage, and I’ve
touched on the themes and lessons that came from the event. But functionally,
the result was my realization of how entirely arbitrary existence is. Reality
provides the experience of going from Zero to Dead with alarming frequency; but
even more troubling for me was the inaccurate signaling my body provided that
anything was wrong.

You would think 99% blockage of a major artery on the heart would be really
really intense, a thunderstruck pain shifting all priority, but it was mostly an
annoyance until it was a misery. But even the misery was just that – an ache one
might get from sleeping poorly, or having eaten an undercooked potato, which
I’ve done once or twice. Only with a number of experts and authorities showing
me exactly how dangerously close I came to ceasing and exactly how that
happened, am I even able to articulate what went on. No sense of conclusion had
come to me beforehand, no overriding awareness of a chapter and possibly the
entire book closing.

It was Luck, but also a Lesson. Things will shift in an instant, and I am likely
to have little warning beforehand. One moment delicious meal, next moment
oblivion. And with that outlook, a lot of stuff came into pretty sharp focus and
a pretty deliberate roadmap came into being.

Building on what I said a couple entries ago, cleaving my possessions into items
held for myself and items held in trust for others betrayed a ridiculous ratio,
something on the order of 99 to 1. For every memento of a person or experience
that I was keeping close, I had dozens and dozens of magazines, floppies and
pieces of equipment I took on just because I was worried nobody else would make
the effort. This outlook had resulted in a shipping container of materials, and
when I finally put together the process of transferring most of them away, the
resulting movement of material was, frankly, shocking.

Thousands of magazines went to organizations and tens of thousands of items went
into the Internet Archive’s physical archives. Monitors went to museums and
individuals, and gaming systems went to yet more locations. By the end of it
all, I had divested so much material to more permanent homes, that it would be
assumed I’d had absolutely nothing left.

And, comparatively, absolutely. It was less than a couple storage units worth, a
sliver of what it was, and that description is where it remains today. In a
recent consolidation effort, with a number of volunteers, a single truckload was
able to take the contents of all the remaining units and put them into one, and
while the view of the remaining storage unit could seem dire on first view, it
is not:

A heartening sign is that a notable percentage is furniture and vintage
equipment, particularly nice pieces that are not compatible with my current
living situation. A good amount are books I’m either going to donate, or which
I’m going to bring back to a bookshelf in my home.

And then, in an amount I will be able to better quantify soon, are the Things
Held in Trust; floppy disks, cassette tapes and typewriters, materials meant to
have something “done” to them, after which they will go into some manner of
permanent storage away from me. This is probably the majority of non-furniture
and technical object items.

The remainder are a set of what would be called my Personal Effects – papers,
drawings, pamphlets, mementos and a handful of artifacts from old jobs, old
experiences, mostly meant as talismans for me, personally, to be able to recall
people and events that otherwise I might have a harder time to remember. How
many of THOSE could stand to be just digital and then stored away with a marking
to toss them if people want, is part of the near future task set.

Now, for a moment, let’s veer into Everything Else.


Sitting in three physical locations around the country are collections of what a
classifier might deem “Touched by Jason Scott”, that is, I am the instigator
that caused the Internet Archive to acquire materials, with an eventual goal
that either the organization at large, or myself, “do something” with them.

This is a lot of material. It’s books, software, papers, videotapes, and a
smidgen here and there of the kind of weird gathered up miscellany that comes
when you absorb the world by the truckload. I can’t estimate how much this is.
It’s probably many tons.

This is waiting for me. If I work on it alone, and single-stream, it will never
be done before I am 100 years old. It’s that’s much.

Luckily, I’m not working alone. There are collections that have a general
mandate to be digitized over time, and I am but one of many potential parties
who may do that work. There are others that will get pulled into other larger
digitization and archiving endeavors that will come along in the future, during
that madness when an entity comes along saying “We want to put this truckload of
cash into a digitizing effort; what do you have available to work on as a set?”

Then there’s some sets that are definitely “mine”, in terms of I advocated for
them, we’re holding them, and in the expanse of time I’m the top candidate to
step in and start getting them pulled into an online form. I’ll resist
distraction listing their classifications and stories, but just be aware they
are in big pallets in a very large set of rooms and the second I address them is
the second they ultimately get addressed.

Which, ultimately, brings me back to being in my hot little rented office,
digitizing whatever materials with whatever equipment is working, as fast as I
can, for as many hours as I can.

Permit me to join the legions of people for whom the Pandemic was and continues
to be disruptive. Besides health issues, I did not visit the Internet Archive
Headquarters and most of the physical archives for years. It put a pause on my
digitization and classification efforts, while no pause was put on acquisition.
(The Archive actually took in dozens of entire libraries of institutions
shutting down during the pandemic, literal millions of books and items.) For a
lot of 2020-2022, significant portions of my pipeline and priorities went out
the window. I wouldn’t call everything “normal” now, but I am proceeding with my
scanning/digitizing efforts full apace now, and doing activities of assessment
and interaction that would have normally been done multiple years before they
actually are happening.

Here, in the present day, things have gotten understandable and quantifiable
enough for me to be able to finally address piles of to-dos that are within 10
minutes of my rented office, easy to pull in, do work on, and then mail away or
store locally in a “just in case” contingency. I expect by the end of this year,
I will have a reasonable understanding of where things are and where they will
be going.

From then, it’s rinse, repeat. Take in each new block of promises and
intentions, do the work, often on a stream, and go forward until I run out of
materials, time, energy or health.

That’s the priority list: Do the media and materials I have machinery for,
acquire machinery to do materials that I currently can’t, exhaust my local
collections, then acquire the larger to-dos from Internet Archive stores and
begin doing those to the best of my abilities.

Simultaneously, be aware of the fact that since I was unable to detect
life-threatening health issues until it was past too late, it’s always possible
that happens again, and I leave everything in a grinding halt, halfway through a
project, with all my machines humming until they crash.

At that point, I hope that that what I’ve left behind is inherently obvious, in
good hands, and understandable in case someone else wants to race the doomsday
clock and make more items see a digital future.

If not… well, buy a Ouija board.



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1 Comment


HOW I DO IT, BUFFERED BY CRIES I AM DOING IT WRONG — FEBRUARY 8, 2023

The last entry garnered an awful lot of attention. While I would normally write
in such a way as to move around between unrelated subjects, sometimes I’m backed
into a corner to do a follow-up or second part; the amount of people who have
wandered into my field of vision to ask me for deep details of what they
variously call my toolchain, setup, or approach has now overflowed my life’s
efficiency.

Here is a quick time-saving suggestion: Skip everything I’m writing down to the
nice picture of the videotapes. Then read what’s after that and don’t comment.

Still here? Let’s go.

There are many things which set me off, but few have been as consistent as Nerd
Bullying, especially where people who consider themselves kings of very tiny
kingdoms take their knowledge and smoosh it in a bowl with their social
awkwardness and lack of cue-observing and come out of the gate with a
way-too-overtuned neg-throwing style and tone criticism.

By all rights, this should be a minor, almost rounding error of an experience,
but part of what I do on the daily is often a process or procedure and Nerd
Bullies looooove these linear steps because it’s one dimension away from a
flowchart and they feel they need to add one more dimension, one more fix,
before it’s either better, or perfect.

Now, of course they have no idea what minefield they’re wandering into with me,
or the disproportionate response it often garners when they’re “just helping”,
but that’s also because I’m translating their words on the fly:

 * “Not sure if you’re aware” – Salutations, Dilettante Moron
 * “Pro Tip” – I think my opinion matters so much it should be canon
 * “Curious ______” – Everything after the word “curious” is always awful
 * “Why are you choosing to _____” – Everything after the words “choosing to” is
   similarly awful

And so on.

Their weirdly-framed criticisms or “Not a question, more of a comment” ends up
doing nothing to move my needle, and in a few cases, gets a profanity-laden rant
they are completely unsure how they signed up for.

Therefore, when people ask/demand how I “do” things, I tend to hesitate, because
instead of providing Education, I feel I am providing Ammunition.

This is all, however, my problem, not anyone else’s. Of course people stumble
through life, confused and various levels of paranoid, unsure if they’re doing
the right thing or oblivious to the fact they aren’t. They found solace in the
churning sea of life’s short run on a floating plank of easy-to-master geekery
and in their minds it becomes an island from which to send up signals of their
prowess before their bad diets send them into the darkness at shockingly high
numbers and shockingly low ages.

And, of course, marbled like fine steak among this crowd are some truly generous
and thoughtful folks, who honestly do want your opinion on what you do,
realizing that someone else’s decisions aren’t edicts or judgements on their
lives and choices. They benefit hearing the footsteps of another soul’s journey
and taking warmth or warning from what they observe.

It’s to these folks I am now speaking.

Let’s get something out of the way: Depending on how you count it, I have, in my
inbox, roughly 100,000 videotapes to process.

With numbers like that, choices are going to be made. Choices of whether to do
anything much with it, how far I’ll get along in the expanse and functional
reality of time, and what exactly a by-tape approach will take. I’ve spent a lot
of time and a lot of consultation to come up with what’s going on currently, and
the journey is not over.

Also, the choices are going to shift over time, as new opportunities present
themselves, costs or income interfere, and long-term trends with the equipment
and materials come to light.

At this point, I’ve digitized roughly 2,000 tapes. Last week I digitized 60. Who
knows what next month will bring. My process is a snapshot, not an immutable
declaration.

What I Do And How I Do It

One of the most variant choices to make are what Codecs your final video files
are going to be in.

For the tapes of value or uniqueness, I am doing Lagarith, a chonky little codec
which is lossless, and then compressed. It works out to anywhere between 25-50gb
an hour. It is memorably huge. It has been around a long time, and it can be
converted into a mass of lossy compression schemes down the line. It leaves the
most options open in that direction. It is a pain in the ass to transfer, taking
hours to upload and download. I keep them interlaced, again to provide the most
options later.

For tapes where I will be dealing with many thousands (think, someone has
recorded years of news programs), I use various types of MPEG-4, which is lossy
(drops bits in the name of saving space) but gets the information across
effectively, and the notably reduced disk space usage means that having a
half-million hours of programs will be within the realm of cost availability.
Should a tape go by that is so incredible it will need to be ripped via
Lagarith, that command will arrive someday and it will be dealt with.

I do not throw out any tapes. They are all stored after digitization.

Currently I use an analog to digital device/card called a BlackMagic Intensity
Pro 4k Card, which is about $240 and which does the job very well. It is
compatible with a wide range of software, does not get flustered easily, and is
not a massive mystery as to how it exactly works. It can work with HDMI,
Component, and S-VIDEO cables, and I use the latter two. I currently have five
of these cards in use.

I don’t care about brands of cables.

I use whatever cable is generally thought of as the “best” connection between
the videotape deck and the outgoing signal. In order, that’s generally HDMI ->
S-VIDEO -> Component -> Composite for me. Since none of the decks I work with
have HDMI conversion (nor do I want it), they almost all are S-VIDEO right now.

The cables from the BlackMagic Intensity are going either into the deck, or
through a “Time Base Corrector” which is located inside of a Panasonic DMR-ES10
DVD Recorder. The cable going into the DMR is either an S-VIDEO or a Component
cable, but right now it’s always an S-VIDEO going into the card because why not.

I did not always use Time-Base Correction at the beginning of my process, but I
use it all the time now. When you’re dealing with terrible, terrible, terrible
tapes, you want to run them through this device, which helps with the signal to
make it synchronize with the sound and not drop frames in a way that the result
is a broken, fuzzy, off-kilter mess. If I don’t use it, it’s simply because I am
dealing with the best of the best tapes, or I recently got a deck and I haven’t
purchased one. In general, I use them all the time.

Finally (on the hardware side), I use a variety of VHS and UMATIC decks, and
will be adding BETAMAX and BETACAM decks as well in the future. In general, I go
for brands that are either well-regarded, or passable with my being given them
for free playing a part.

Right now, the weirdest decks I use are SONY SVO-9500MD decks, which normally go
inside MRI machines. They have very, very, very capability and they’re built
like tanks. Someone who donated one to me had gotten it, and his insight caused
me to love this model type very much.

I also use some variation of JVC S9600U SsVHS machines, because they have a lot
of circuitry inside to take absolutely terrible tapes and make them look better.
When I was dealing with bootleg rock tapes that are on their 3rd-5th generation,
this makes a difference.

For the UMATIC tapes, I’m currently working with a SONY VP-5000 machine. This
machine is hell on earth to work with, but when it all comes together, the image
and output is very nice. The JVC and 9500MD decks put out SVIDEO, while this
VP-5000 puts out a BNC connection I convert to component into the Time-Base
Corrector.

Now you know the “Hardware Chain”.

For software, I am currently using Virtualdub, which is a rather old piece of
video processing software, but which works very well for the straightforward
“take in what’s coming on the BlackMagic card, and turn it into a file”. I can
run two of it on a single Windows machine, with two BlackMagic cards in it. When
I’m done with the files, I can use a third instance of Virtualdub to crop either
side of the recording so I don’t have minutes (or hours) of blank space being
stored in the file. So, in this way, Virtualdub is both a capture, and a
finisher.

I do not process the files further. I do not de-interlace. I do not convert them
to another codec beyond Lagarith. I put them on USB drives and I upload them as
is, with the filenames as the metadata that was written on the tapes, if any.

Again, for the more “Tape to File” mindsets:

 * VHS or UMATIC Tape
 * Sony SVO-9500MD or JVC S9600U SVHS, or SONY VP-5000 UMATIC
 * Connected via SVIDEO or Component Cable to Time Base Corrector
 * Panasonic DMR-ES10 DVD Recorder being used as a pass-through Time Base
   Corrector
 * S-VIDEO and the Audio Cables into a BlackMagic Intensity Pro 4k Card for each
   Deck
 * Capturing video via Virtualdub for each card, running in Windows 10 or 11
 * Lagarith Codec, Nothing Special Added,
 * Cropped via Virtualdub and uploaded with Filename as Metadata

This is how I do, and this is how I do it.

Philosophy

Come back in a year, and I may have changed any part of this – this is not a
final decision with no negotiation, although I have talked to more people than
most might expect, and the choices here come from a real place and aren’t
random.

The tapes are not thrown out, and can be revisited. I do not let myself worry
that I get one shot with the tapes – in almost all cases, I’m going after tapes
that would never have seen any treatment at all, so what I’m doing in the
aggregate is already better than expected.

This is all very hard on the decks. I expect to go through many along the way. I
do not throw them out when they break, yet, and will see what goes on.

My experience is USB digitizers (you plug the video into a little device, and
the little device goes into a USB port) are not dependable.

Everything I digitize, I share immediately. People find errors and I have fixed
them.

I am focused on doing the same thing decently enough 100,000 times, not doing a
tiny handful of things perfectly. If you have 20 tapes to work with, no doubt
you’ll be different. You may be different all the way down, in fact. Have a
ball. Don’t tell me.

See you on the stream.

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3 Comments


ARCHIVING IN THE TIME OF STREAMING — FEBRUARY 4, 2023

Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what
all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of
their lives, your thing is already hopelessly complicated and gaining enough of
a foothold to feign interest is olympic-level effort. For people who do make it
the center, your description fills them with a never-abating dread that you’re
going to get the explanation “wrong”, or that you’re going to give the Outsiders
a bad impression.

So let’s begin at the beginning, again.

My parents’ divorce, taking place in the realm of the beginning of the 1980s,
was not in any way friendly and in fact rather contentious. I wasn’t yet a
teenager, and I was the oldest, and most notable for the purposes of this story,
my mother gathered up her children and scooted off to first a hotel and then a
location with family, without telling my father where she had taken us. In
modern parlance, the term is “child abduction”, although I’m sure my mother
didn’t think that’s what she was doing. Ultimately, connections were made, a
nasty divorce proceeding happened, nobody was shot, stabbed, restrained, or
attacked.

But in many presentations I’ve given, I mark the moment of being scuttled out of
the family home into the great unknown of Outside The Neighborhood as being when
my focus and awareness of the world fundamentally changed, because as she put
things into the station wagon and tearfully told her kids to get ready to go,
she also asked us to take what we needed. Which is a difficult question for
someone in the realm of ten years old.

I needed a blanket and my dog.

Woven into the simple declaration take what you need are a host of world and
perspective-changing understandings of what you and need are. Let’s not overplay
the trauma aspect of it all, and focus on the concepts being dropped on me and
my siblings, which first and foremost is a crumbling of rock-solid foundations.
Foundations of family, to be sure, but also possession, consistency and
location. Home was no longer an immutable realm, but split into multiple
locations, one inevitably a favorite, with the other a shadow of the concept of
home. Possessions stopped becoming things you could walk out of sight from and
be a hundred percent sure (maybe 90-95 percent sure) they’d be there when you
came back. And most effective on me was the idea that lack of effort to maintain
the talismans and protocols of representation would result in a void. Put more
simply: You’re the keeper of yourself and of what matters. There is no
consistency that will protect you.



Like a lot of knowledge, this came at some level of heavy price, although I
again stress the price is one many others pay at much greater cost. The fact
remains that both my parents bent over backwards to provide opportunities, to
ensure comfort and food and connection as best they could, and while I can sit
back in my fifties and leave notes as to my parents’ actions in their thirties,
my own thirties were spent in hacker conventions, shooting films and stumbling
through my own home life, so I’m quite the unqualified judge.

This is all to say that when Chris Boufford showed me an acoustic modem in his
grandparents’ spare room and how, by calling another number in Mount Kisco and
putting the receiver of the phone into a cradle you’d suddenly get words on the
screen, I had lived a life up to that point where two thoughts came almost
simultaneously:

This is amazing.

I need to save this before it inevitably disappears.

I couldn’t have known that in the years afterwards, I would in fact collect so
many artifacts from this thing, this concept of the Bulletin Board System, that
I’d meet many of the people responsible for it existing, that this pile of
artifacts would get a name and a branding, and that I’d collect it all so hard
that I’d end up being associated with the concept of it for a lifetime. But I
definitely understood, taught as I was during that painful childhood lesson,
that inaction would be tantamount to approving its destruction and
disappearance.

Calling as I did to many BBSes in my teen years, I’d focus on the textfiles, the
message bases, the downloadable files, because they felt, I think, like special
missives from beyond my little life and easily kept on floppy disks. When disks
were the main way to store computer data for home users, you would encounter two
kinds of people: folks who kept a small, special set of floppies representing
what they needed, and others who had vast, terrifyingly large collections
representing not what they needed but what they thought should be held in trust.
I’ve gone through a lot of these collections over the years, and have seen rooms
full of these things, hundreds and sometimes thousands, representing homemade
bunkers of data. I had my own bunker, and while it was only a few dozen, the
relative smallness of textfiles meant that each disk could hold many, many
examples of these artifacts I thought deserved whatever long life I could
provide.



At what point does a hoarder of data, driven by a sense of loss and of fear of
same, turn from a mere accumulation of piles and end up with something
resembling an archive?

I can point to various choices I was making in my teenage years with textfiles
as the whole endeavor being more than just a private copy of things I liked:
creating capsule descriptions of the textfiles for my own BBS, giving them
unique extensions (HUM, PHK, HAC, PRO) to classify them in general genre
headers, and attempting to keep the authorship and context of the files in the
form of “buffers”, just saving all the output of a BBS to keep a record of where
the files came from. I can find in my stacks actual essays I’d written about
what these files were, and throwing my own writings in amongst everyone else’s
so my own works wouldn’t be lost.

My college years were where all of it could easily have come to naught. New
city, new goals, explorations and discovering my new set of interests could have
led to my younger days and their collections being scattered to the wind. In a
series of lucky maneuvers and chances across that period, I did not lose my
textfiles and floppies and printouts, and they persisted for about 8 years in my
hands and in the hands of a friend, David Weinstock, who kept things I was “done
with” and critically asked me if I wanted them back. And by the time he asked, I
did want them back. My own collection and archive, itself, came at the same risk
of entropy and disappearance but the spinning wheel fell on “save” and I had
them all again.

In my twenties is when I start creating The Warrens.

I don’t have a lot of handy photos of all the Warrens, and maybe that’s a
compilation I need to add back here as I find them again. But over and over
again, I turn wherever I’m living, or a single room within it, into a cramped,
filled-to-the-brim, often deeply concerning space of materials. These will be
favorite books, personal collections of memories, computer hardware and
software, and an ever-growing set of amusements and pieces into my own
functioning workspace. “Work”, in many cases, being the day-to-day activities of
a geek browsing online things or playing with some sort of toy or tool, but
surrounded by all the possibilities and options at arm’s length should my
shifting focus switch to a new attraction.

I create Warrens a lot. Casting my net backwards, I count six of them, and each
one a tiring memory to me, as I consider how much effort it took to build them
up, and then inevitably pull them apart.




While it’s fundamentally silly to think each Warren was going to be the absolute
last, there was definitely an approach and plan with each one to improve what
came before. Bins instead of piles, thematic groupings instead of simple shelves
of one kind of medium, and so on. Ultimately, though, they all have had flaws
and they’ve all had a lifespan. My life changes and the Warrens soon collapse
like a circus tent and travel to the next stop.

The site called TEXTFILES.COM caused me to regard not only my collection but the
contributions of others, and the resulting documentary that I shot about
bulletin board systems put me in a lot of homes with a lot of similar Warrens,
and somewhere along that continuum, I found myself constructing an awareness of
the types of items being collected by me and others, and giving them
classifications. In more and more cases, I started to take on others’
collections as well, which forced me to think about it even harder.

Here’s what a few decades of this cobbled together in my mind:

When we end up with our physical and digital piles of material, there’s a couple
grand classifications that help parse what we’ve got, and for some folks, they
need this to process the next steps to take, especially if they’re overwhelmed.
And those classifications are things that are you, things held in trust, and
things held in indifference.

Things that are you tends to be stuff that you’ve created, be it writings,
photos or saved data that represents projects or memories, and which is relevant
as your trail of effect through your lived life. E-mails you’ve written, images
you’ve made, and the inevitable works we consciously or unconsciously create as
people. These items are not necessarily precious, but they are often rare – you
have the only copy or item, only you maintain it. And in fact, only you may see
any value in it or understand what it is.

Things held in trust are items that may or may not have deep meaning or
relevance to you, but which you acquired from without – the downloaded programs,
or bought books, or a six-foot statue you won an auction for years ago. You
didn’t make these things, and there may be many copies of them, or you again
might have the only one: but if they’re not part of your functioning life, then
I consider them “held in trust”, as a caretaker keeps maintaining a garden or
structure, towards some future.

Things held in indifference are all those pieces of life that acquire around a
certain personality – ranging from discarded envelopes from packages you got, to
motherboards and loose screws from machines long gone and pamphlets from trips
and travel that you shoved into a suitcase and then forgot about. Some
personality types (say, someone who remembers that time long ago he had to give
up everything to take what he needed) might impulsively acquire things and then
forget about them almost immediately. These collections can overlap with the
items held in trust or the things that are the person’s own creations, as well.

When I give advice to people on what to do when they wake up one day and realize
they have 2,000 CD-ROMs or piles of magazines they’ll never read, or stacks of
VHS tapes of shows they bought 20 years ago and now will never watch, is help
them reach the “end of the story”. People want a story, and they want the story
to have a happy ending. I advise them on how to frame that story:

..but then, after asking a number of message boards and confidantes about what
to do about this multi-gigabyte zip of Wojacks, the collector uploaded them to a
website, finally resting knowing this long-gathered precious trust of meme juice
would survive another generation. The End.

..but in a shocking twist, it turned out there was a weirdo working for an
Archive of the Internet who wanted these stacks of CD-ROMs and floppies, and
they offered a home which immediately cleared up that part of the garage,
allowing the lawnmower to finally be stored inside, The End.

…having discovered that there are plenty of National Geographic issues to go
around and there was no need to keep them around, our hero contacted a local old
folks’ home and donated them to the residents’ library, where they were happily
passed around and enjoyed for years to come. The End.

What is now past a decade working for the Internet Archive has meant that I’m
working in both physical and digital concerns, and each one has challenges and
its own peculiar qualities. Millions of items are being shipped to large
warehouses controlled by Internet Archive, and millions of files and “items” are
being added to the online presence. In some cases, they live in both places,
existing in boxes in pallets in shipping containers in rooms in a building, and
also inside a .zip file inside an identifier inside a search result on a
website.

I’ve concocted ideas, then, on Archiving.

It’s probably as good a time as now to say that I am not universally beloved as
a figure or authority. I am not a professionally trained archivist, but I’ve
spent my entire life somewhere in the discipline, and it is not hard, if you
seek them out, to find people who consider my very existence in the field to be
a cavalcade of gaps in judgement by the world and by, perhaps, destiny itself.
Why, in a world overflowing with top-notch expertise by individuals educated by
some of the finest academic programs and concerns, would this street-wise dandy
be considered the one to listen to?

Well, for one thing, I’m fuckin’ hilarious. But I also think it’s because I come
to a lot of my conclusions and efforts from the point of view of ad-hoc need and
not because I read somewhere that it’s where I should be putting my resources
towards. I made a documentary about bulletin boards because I was concerned many
of these people would die and there’d be no record of them and their
perspective; and I was right. Doing this work put me in touch with lives and
people who had collections that lacked a specific interest by established
institutions, and so I was the one who helped keep them around, or even take
them personally. And when the time came for me to join forces with Internet
Archive, I was already strongly my own thing and it was a partnership, not a
subsumption.

And so from this situation comes a pile of general credos and rules of thumb
I’ve picked up in my travels:

Where possible, save the original. Where possible, digitize the original or
maintain a digital copy. Ephemera and transient content is just as important to
maintain as products and projects. Digitize at the highest resolution and
fidelity possible, but realize you’re never going to get it perfect and keep the
originals around, if you can. Make digital copies as widely available as
possible, all the time, so it finds its value to people seeking it.

It seems pretty basic stuff, but some of it is hotly contested and virtual ink
spilled by the gallon about process, style and considerations along the way.
It’s what works for me, and on the whole, it’s been a succcess.

In this world-view, one of the critical parts of the whole aspect of “archiving”
is making that digital copy of something physical or analog, using tools and
equipment to do so. Naturally, “Born Digital” items merely need to be kept
around and maintained, but items that are sitting in another medium or container
need to make the leap over the Air Gap into virtual/digital reality and that’s
where it gets complicated.



I’ve been asked, in all manner of ways, what the most difficult part of the
process is – is it tracking down items to work on, or finding the right order,
or devising which video container codec is best for a ripping of a VHS tape, the
DPI of a paper scan, or which equipment stack is best for the job?

No, none of that.

It’s the crushing loneliness.

It’s the functional experience of facing down a pile of things that are in one
format, and doing whatever steps are taken, over and over, to convert them into
another form: the loading of the papers into the feed reader, the stacking of
CD-ROMs into a ripping device, the constant movements of putting tapes into tape
players and turning the capturing software on and off, typing in the filenames
with metadata information as it’s done. Doing it endlessly, facing down hundreds
and sometimes thousands of components in a single “collection” with lots of
potential for mistakes, do-overs, unexpected failures, and all the bumps in the
road for what seems like a very straightforward task.

It’s slowly grinding through a backlog of promises and easily-said agreements to
turn This into That, and then finding hours, days, and weeks of your life
drained out of you, resulting in barely enough data to fill a percentage of a
modern hard drive.

The secret-not-so-secret is a lot of this work falls under “it should be paid
for”, because it requires just enough mental capacity as to not be
automation-ready, but the minute-to-minute joy of it is absolutely minimal,
repetitive, and only enjoyable in the rear view mirror looking back at all the
stuff you did. The occasional bright gem of something truly interesting and
weird won’t make up for the hundreds of times you’ll be getting a necessary but
basic item hoisted into digital, and after enough time, you just wear out.

When I started digitizing VHS tapes en masse, I did a bunch of research and
asking a number of people how they approached the task, and an interesting theme
of conclusions came out: Most were working with a specific set of items, and
most of them burnt out after 20 to 50 tapes. Almost nobody went past that
amount, even when they had many more to do.

My solution, then, was to Stream.

For the years I’ve been doing the fundamentally boring VHS and U-Matic tape
ripping as part of my projects, I’ve almost always had a stream going on Twitch.
It’s at https://twitch.tv/textfiles and it has ranged from a non-camera showing
of what was being digitized to a full-on just-short-of-a-televised-show
experience, while I move through piles of cassettes stacked to the ceiling from
donated sets.

In this way, I’ve digitized (at this juncture) over two thousand videotapes,
with many more to come.

The initial work was being done out of my actual apartment, which made sense
until it really, really didn’t.

The nature of this sort of project is spare parts, awaiting cardboard boxes, and
a mildew smell that starts to hit you when you walk in. At some phase of life,
this is tolerable, but just like separating things that are you from things held
in trust, it’s better to have a dedicated workshop away from a living space.

So, I started renting an office.

It’s in one of those facilities where they have dozens of rental rooms and has a
set of group amenities like a kitchen, copy room, and even meeting rooms.
Obviously, it cost more than just stuffing everything into my home, but the
separation has turned out to be particularly healthy, both in terms of knowing
what lying around is my own stuff, and what is destined for long-term storage
after being digitized.

After consulting with my friend Kyle, I re-imagined the entire “streaming”
approach to be focused on the image, and having it both look good, and look
informative. The result is striking:

People have asked what the huge monitor is, behind me. I’ll answer that one
straight off – it’s a cheap LCD TV, purchased for my apartment and long-since
superseded by others but still working enough to look fine on a camera. The
lighting is from two $25 LED lights designed for the purpose, along with a
webcam aimed down the maw of the U-Matic tape device, since I have to keep the
top off anyway (constant cleaning). The camera recording me is a mirrorless DSLR
(a few hundred dollars) in constant monitor mode, and sending it all to a
HDMI-to-USB Camlink.

Some time in the future, let me go into further detail of The Setup and the
Toolchain, which a certain segment of audience can’t get enough of, and another
can’t stand a smidgen of.

Instead, let me say that what’s obvious, looking in the context of my full life
with this endeavor, is that I’ve built yet another Warren.

Cameras and framing are very deceiving. The room is tiny, barely 70 square feet.
The day I toured the facility and was sent the stack of paper I needed to sign
up for a year of long-term residence, they included a “typical” picture, which
is either my office or the one next to it, and the difference is striking:



Because of the equipment, it runs very hot in there. Because I’ve got all the
projects going on from so many sources, it’s also a bit noisy. Filters on my
studio microphone prevent my audience from hearing the never-ending humming.

Composing the dull, generic room that I was given into the cyber-scape of
fluorescent dreams that now appears on the Twitch stream has been a multi-year
project. Tapes and other products move in, get processed, boxed up, shipped out.
Streams have been a few minutes or many hours, depending on what I’m focused on
and what time permits. And because I have a dedicated space, I can be very loud,
very intense, and be able to speak freely on subjects without worrying I’m
ruining anyone’s living conditions or sleep. It has worked spectacularly.

But again, the real purpose of this Warren is to share – to share with people
online (thousands of them, over the years) with what I’m up to, to have
conversations or debates through chat and phones, and to be able to conduct
myself in a way that doesn’t feel like a prison sentence, even if the space I’m
functioning in resembles a jail cell a little too much.

I know this set of decisions and designs is not for everyone. Not everyone wants
to yammer constantly while doing their job to a shifting, weird audience of
onlookers. Not everyone feels they need multi-colored lights and a massive
background video to conduct themselves, but not everyone is processing thousands
of videotapes all their waking hours, with a dreary consistency that would have
long-ago wrenched all joy and delight from the occasional discoveries. Even with
my motivations to archive and share being life-long, and my individual cramped
spaces being laboratories that I use to experiment and improve my processes, it
turns out that isolation didn’t give me focus – audiences do.



Here, in the contemporary time of my archiving life, really an archiving
lifetime, is me now trying to turn the promise of endless stacks of media and
materials into digital form, to make them reachable to the world, before
something, and there’s more than a few somethings up to the task, takes me out
of the game. It’s a life born of a tragedy, but that tragedy caused perspective,
and that perspective has given me an awareness of how much has been done and how
much is left to do.

From my cramped Warren launches hundreds of recorded moments, and maybe, with
the help of a kind set of eyes, I’ll get a lot more of the work ahead done.

The twitch stream is at https://twitch.tv/textfiles. See you there.

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9 Comments


INFINITE INBOXES OF INFINITY — JANUARY 23, 2023

Carcinization is the tendency of reality to keep making things into Crabs or
Crab-like creatures. (De-Carcinization is when it goes the other way, and in
fact there’s evidence of oscillation between the two states.) It’s the sort of
thing that sounds fantastically interesting, the shallow end of the thinking
pool, but then leaves you confused as to what to do with that information – you
can’t fully stop it, and there’s no reason you might specifically want to. And
whatever crab-making is happening now doesn’t really affect you in the short or
even long-term – it’s just happening.

What I discovered, this late in life, is I turn everything into an inbox. Again,
I’m not sure this is going to change your existence or opinion in any way, but
here we are.

In the dim mists of decades ago, I appear to have launched into a serialization
of projects that I’ve never recovered from, making piles of to-dos and tasks and
then attacking them, often at the expense of all else, for hours and hours. The
earliest efforts of what became TEXTFILES.COM was me gathering textfiles from
all sorts of bulletin board systems, logging in to grab copies and take
text-based snapshots of what was there, then dragging it home into piles of
floppy disks, with the goal of…. well, something. I started calling the disks
“The Works, Disk _____” as I visualized, at 13, that I would one day have a BBS
called The Works and these disks would be the starting seed vault that it would
grow from. The fact this happened is quite remarkable to me, but it happened.
The Works BBS under Jason became the Works BBS under David and then Matt and
then Others, and I then took the textfiles of The Works BBS and it became a
site, itself a collection of descriptions that came because I created a second
Inbox, one of describing roughly 50,000 files by myself.

That all seems like a rather straightforward observation, except it turns out
that nearly everything I am doing, in all situations, has become an inbox, a
collection of waiting piles of transferred or fetched tasks that require some
sort of response, acknowledgement, or process as a result.

All this to say, that’s why this weblog hasn’t seen a real update in years.

The dark side of a Life of Inbox is that if some inboxes are more pressing or
easier to process, other inboxes fall by the wayside, because they either
require Deep Thought or otherwise need my full attention, and my full attention
has become a rare commodity indeed.

I started this site for, essentially, Essays. Thoughts that would be best
explained in detail, and then referenced over time, where people could pick them
apart or talk about them, or be able to explain my motivations or efforts in a
laid-back, slow-cooked, contemplative fashion instead of the hottest bon mot to
fly out of my keyboard. And for years, it was definitely that.

Two things took that away.

First, the Podcast turned into a receptacle for both my essays, and
presentations I might give; 12-20 minute compositions about subjects I thought
needed covering, offered in a way that both reached people, and allowed, through
a Patreon, to help cover my debts and money issues over the years. For both
those situations, it has been a runaway success – my debts are basically paid
(although I do get costs like medical that crop up, and taxes still continue to
be a bother), and I’m happy with the subjects I’ve dove into across over 200
episodes, which is a lot of episodes to be sure.

Second, social media is a very nice way to construct a simple outlook, a shallow
formed snowball from some half-cooked ideals, and throw them into the public
sphere. And that’s been fascinating in its own right, and led to crushing lows
and exhilarating highs. I’ve been lambasted, treated like royalty, and made
amazing connections via the various to-the-minute inboxes they represent.

But with the very real, very actual spiral of Twitter, one of my inboxes has
cleared up with a puff of poorly-administrated smoke. Because of architectural
changes, I’m no longer getting what the folks call “engagement” in a meaningful
way, and Mastodon, where I find myself living as well, does not encourage the
multiple-dives-a-day energy of Twitter (for the better of all, to be honest).

So, back comes this weblog, with the 2020s in full swing and the world grinding
along, and it’s nice to be back. I try not to cover old ground unless it’s
needed, so the Rule of Essays continues.

Let’s go.

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6 Comments


IS THIS THING ON? — AUGUST 13, 2020

OK, let’s bring this thing back. Talk to you soon.

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15 Comments


THE FULL BBS DOCUMENTARY INTERVIEWS ARE GOING ONLINE — JANUARY 24, 2018

This year, the full 250 hours of interviews I conducted for the BBS Documentary
are going online at the Internet Archive.



There’s already a collection of them up, from when I first set out to do this.
Called “The BBS Documentary Archive“, it’s currently 32 items from various
interviews, including a few clip farms and full interviews of a bunch of people
who sat with me back in the years of 2002-2004 to talk about all matter of
technology and bulletin board history.

That collection, as it currently stands, is a bit of an incomplete mess. Over
the course of this project, it will become a lot less so. I’ll be adding every
minute of tape I can recover from my storage, as well as fixing up metadata
where possible. Naturally you will be asked to help as well.



A bit of background for people coming into this cold: I shot a movie called
“BBS: The Documentary” which ended up being an eight episode mini-series. It
tried to be the first and ultimately the last large documentary about bulletin
board systems, those machines hooked up to phone lines that lived far and wide
from roughly 1978-2000s. They were brilliant and weird and they’re one of the
major examples of life going online. They laid the foundation for a population
that used the Internet and the Web, and I think they’re terribly interesting.

I was worried that we were going to never get The Documentary On BBSes and so I
ended up making it. It’s already 10 years and change since the movie came out,
and there’s not been another BBS Documentary, so I guess this is it. My movie
was very North American-centric and didn’t go into blistering detail about Your
Local BBS Scene, and some people resented that, but I stand by both decisions;
just getting the whole thing done required a level of effort and energy I’m sure
I’m not capable of any more.

Anyway, I’m very proud of that movie.



I’m also proud of the breadth of interviews – people who pioneered BBSes in the
1970s, folks who played around in scenes both infamous and obscure, and experts
in areas of this story that would never, ever have been interviewed by any other
production. This movie has everything: Vinton Cerf (co-creator of the Internet)
along with legends of Fidonet like Tom Jennings and Ken Kaplan and even John
Madill, who drew the FidoNet dog logo. We’ve got ANSI kids and Apple II crackers
and writers of a mass of the most popular BBS software packages. The creator of
.QWK packets and multiple members of the Cult of the Dead Cow. There’s so much
covered here that I just think would never, ever be immortalized otherwise.

And the movie came out, and it sold really well, and I open licensed it, and
people discover it every day and play it on YouTube or pull out the package and
play the original DVDs. It’s a part of culture, and I’m just so darn proud of
it.



Part of the reason the movie is watchable is because I took the 250 hours of
footage and made it 7.5 hours in total. Otherwise… well….

…unless, of course, you’re a maniac, and you want to watch me talking with
people about subjects decades in the past and either having it go really well or
fall completely apart. The shortest interview is 8 minutes. The longest is five
hours. There’s legions of knowledge touched on in these conversations, stuff
that can be a starting port for a bunch of research that would otherwise be out
of options to even find what the words are.



Now, a little word about self-doubt.

When I first starting uploading hours of footage of BBS Documentary interviews
to the Internet Archive, I was doing it from my old job, and I had a lot going
on. I’d not done much direct work with Internet Archive and didn’t know anything
going on behind the scenes or how things worked or frankly much about the
organization in any meaningful amount. I just did it, and sent along something
like 20 hours of footage. Things were looking good.

Then, reviews.

Some people started writing a few scathing responses to the uploads, pointing
out how rough they were, my speech patterns, the interview style, and so on.
Somehow, I let that get into my head, and so, with so much else to do, I
basically walked away from it.



12 years later (12 years!) I’m back, and circumstances have changed.

I work for the Archive, I’ve uploaded hundreds of terabytes of stuff, and the
BBS documentary rests easily on its laurels of being a worthwhile production.
Comments by randos about how they wish I’d done some prettify-ing of the
documentary “raw” footage don’t even register. I’ve had to swim upstream through
a cascade of poor responses to things I’ve done in public since then – they
don’t get at me. It took some time to get to this place of comfort, which is why
I bring it up. For people who think of me as some bulletproof soul, let it be
known that “even I” had to work up to that level, even when sitting on something
like BBS Documentary and years of accomplishment. And those randos? Never heard
from them again.

The interview style I used in the documentary raw footage should be noted
because it’s deliberate: they’re conversations. I sometimes talk as much as the
subjects. It quickly became obvious that people in this situation of describing
BBS history would have aspects that were crystal clear, but would also have a
thousand little aspects lost in fuzzy clouds of memory. As I’d been studying
BBSes intensely for years at this point, it would often take me telling them
some story (and often the same stories) to trigger a long-dormant tale that they
would fly with. In many cases, you can see me shut up the second people
talk, because that was why I was talking in the first place. I should have known
people might not get that, and I shouldn’t have listened to them so long ago.

And from these conversations come stories and insights that are priceless. Folks
who lived this life in their distant youth have all sorts of perspectives on
this odd computer world and it’s just amazing that I have this place and
collection to give them back to you.

But it will still need your help.

Here’s the request.

I lived this stupid thing; I really, really want to focus on putting a whole
bunch of commitments to bed. Running the MiniDV recorder is not too hard for me,
and neither is the basic uploading process, which I’ve refined over the years.
But having to listen to myself for hundreds of hours using whatever time I have
on earth left… it doesn’t appeal to me at all.

And what I really don’t want to do, beyond listening to myself, is enter the
endless amount of potential metadata, especially about content. I might be
inspired to here and there, especially with old friends or interviews I find
joyful every time I see them again. But I can’t see myself doing this for
everything and I think metadata on a “subjects covered” and “when was this all
held” is vital for the collection having use. So I need volunteers to help me. I
run a Discord server that communicates with people collaborating with me and I
have a bunch of other ways to be reached. I’m asking for help here – turning
this all into something useful beyond just existing is a vital step that I think
everyone can contribute to.

If you think you can help with that, please step forward.

Otherwise… step back – a lot of BBS history is about to go online.



 

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4 Comments


THE UNDISCOVERED — JANUARY 20, 2018

There’s a bit of a nuance here; this entry is less about the specific situation
I’m talking about, than about the kind of situation it is.

I got pulled into this whole thing randomly, when someone wrote me to let me
know it was going along. Naturally, I fired into it all with all cylinders, but
after a while, I figured out very good people were already on it, by days, and
so I don’t actually have to do much of anything. That works for me.

It went down like this.

MOS Technology designed the 6502 chip which was in a mass of home computers in
the 1970s and 1980s. (And is still being sold today.) The company, founded in
1969, was purchased in 1976 by Commodore (they of the 64 and Amiga) and became
their chip production arm. A lot of the nitty gritty details are in the
Wikipedia page for MOS. This company, now a subsidiary, lived a little life in
Pennsylvania throughout the 1980s as part of the Commodore family. I assume
people went to work, designed things, parked in the parking lot, checked out
prototypes, responded to crazy Commodore administration requests… the usual.

In 1994, Commodore went out of business and its pieces bought by various groups.
In the case of the MOS Technology building, it was purchased by various
management and probably a little outside investment, and became a new company,
called GMT Microelectronics. GMT did whatever companies like that do, until
2001, when they were shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency because it
turns out they kind of contaminated the groundwater and didn’t clean it up very
well.

Then the building sat, a memory to people who cared about the 6502 (like me), to
former employees, and probably nobody else.

Now, welcome to 2017!



The building has gotten a new owner who wants to turn the property into
something useful. To do this, they basically have to empty it, raze the building
the ground, clean the ground, and then build a new building. Bravo, developer.
Remember, this building has sat for 16 years, unwanted and unused.



The sign from the GMT days still sits outside, unchanged and just aged from when
the building was once that business. Life has certainly gone on. By the way,
these photos are all from Doug Crawford of the Vintage Computing Federation, who
took this tour in late 2017.

Inside, as expected, it is a graffiti and firepit shitshow, the result of years
of kids and others camping out in the building’s skeletal remains and probably
whiling away the weekends hanging out.







And along with these pleasant scenes of decay and loss are some others involving
what Doug thought were “Calcium Deposits” and which I personally interpret
as maybe I never need to set foot in this building at any point in my future
life and probably will have to burn any clothing I wear should I do so.



But damn if Doug didn’t make the journey into this environmentally problematic
deathtrap to document it, and he even brought a guest of some reknown related to
Commodore history: Bil Herd, one of the designers of the Commodore 128.



So, here’s what I want to get to: In this long-abandoned building, decades past
prime and the province of trespassers and neglect, there turns out to have been
quite a bit of Commodore history lying about.





There’s unquestionably some unusually neat items here – old printed
documentation, chip wafers, and those magnetic tapes of who knows what; maybe
design or something else that needed storage.

So here’s the thing; the person who was cleaning up this building for
demolishing was put into some really weird situations – he wanted people to know
this was here, and maybe offer it up to collectors, but as the blowback happened
from folks when he revealed he’d been throwing stuff out, he was thrown into a
defensive position and ultimately ended up sticking with looking into selling
it, like salvage.

I think there’s two lessons here:

 1. There’s no question there’s caches of materials out there, be they in old
    corporate offices, warehouses, storerooms, or what have you, that are likely
    precious windows into bygone technology. There’s an important lesson in not
    assuming “everything” is gone and maybe digging a bit deeper. That means
    contacting places, inquiring with simple non-badgering questions, and being
    known as someone interested in some aspect of history so people might
    contact you about opportunities going forward.
 2. Being a shouty toolbox about these opportunities will not improve the
    situation.

I am lucky enough to be offered a lot of neat materials in a given month; people
contact me about boxes, rooms and piles that they’re not sure what the right
steps are. They don’t want to be lectured or shouted at; they want ideas and
support as they work out their relationship to the material. These are often
commercial products now long-gone and there’s a narrative that old automatically
means “payday at auction” and that may or may not be true; but it’s a very
compelling narrative, especially when times are hard.

So much has been saved and yes, a lot has been lost. But if the creators of the
6502 can have wafers and materials sitting around for 20 years after the company
closed, I think there’s some brightness on the horizon for a lot of other “lost”
materials as well.

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4 Comments


JASON SCOTT TALKS HIS WAY OUT OF IT: A PODCAST — SEPTEMBER 15, 2017

Next week I start a podcast.

There’s a Patreon for the podcast with more information here.

Let me unpack a little of the thinking.



Through the last seven years, since I moved back to NY, I’ve had pretty variant
experiences of debt or huge costs weighing me down. Previously, I was making
some serious income from a unix admin job, and my spending was direct but pretty
limited. Since then, even with full-time employment (and I mean, seriously, a
dream job), I’ve made some grandiose mistakes with taxes, bills and tracking
down old obligations that means I have some notable costs floating in the
background.

Compound that with a new home I’ve moved to with real landlords that aren’t
family and a general desire to clean up my life, and I realized I needed some
way to make extra money that will just drop directly into the bill pit, never to
really pass into my hands.

How, then, to do this?

I work very long hours for the Internet Archive, and I am making a huge
difference in the world working for them. It wouldn’t be right or useful for me
to take on any other job. I also don’t want to be doing something like making
“stuff” that I sell or otherwise speculate into some market. Leave aside I have
these documentaries to finish, and time has to be short.

Then take into account that I can no longer afford to drop money going to
anything other than a small handful of conferences that aren’t local to me (the
NY-CT-NJ Tri-State area), and that people really like the presentations I give.

So, I thought, how about me giving basically a presentation once a week? What if
I recorded me giving a sort of fireside chat or conversational presentation
about subjects I would normally give on the road, but make them into a
downloadable podcast? Then, I hope, everyone would be happy: fans get a
presentation. I get away from begging for money to pay off debts. I get to
refine my speaking skills. And maybe the world gets something fun out of the
whole deal.

Enter a podcast, funded by a Patreon.

The title: Jason Talks His Way Out of It, my attempt to write down my debts and
share the stories and thoughts I have.

I announced the Patreon on my 47th birthday. Within 24 hours, about 100 people
had signed up, paying some small amount (or not small, in some cases) for each
published episode. I had a goal of $250/episode to make it worthwhile, and we
passed that handily. So it’s happening.



I recorded a prototype episode, and that’s up there, and the first episode of
the series drops Monday. These are story-based presentations roughly 30 minutes
long apiece, and I will continue to do them as long as it makes sense to.

Public speaking is something I’ve done for many, many years, and I enjoy it, and
I get comments that people enjoy them very much. My presentation on That Awesome
Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars has passed 800,000 views on the various
copies online.

I spent $40 improving my sound setup, which should work for the time being. (I
already had a nice microphone and a SSD-based laptop which won’t add sound to
the room.) I’m going to have a growing list of topics I’ll work from, and I’ll
stay in communication with the patrons.

Let’s see what this brings.

One other thing: Moving to the new home means that a lot of quality of life
issues have been fixed, and my goal is to really shoot forward finishing those
two documentaries I owe people. I want them done as much as everyone else! And
with less looming bills and debts in my life, it’ll be all I want to do.

So, back the new podcast if you’d like. It’ll help a lot.

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4 Comments

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Jason Scott's weblog of computer history, punditry and trivia, from the creator
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