Just wanted to mention how Slashdot never fails to disappoint.
For the record, textfiles.com has no ads. None. Going to it or not going to it doesn't affect my revenue/income particularly. I don't run that site for money.
The article kind of glosses over that time that AOL released its users onto the Internet at large with absolutely no barriers or training, even an indication they were really not on AOL.
One of my funniest memories of that time was when someone had a webpage up criticizing AOL, and an AOL admin/cop/whatever contacted him and seriously explained that the webmaster was violating AOL's terms of service, and to take the webpage down immediately or have his AOL account terminated.
People looking for examples of how a corporate entity will gang-bang a shared service at the first opportunity need look no further than AOL and its toxic bus-load drop-offs onto the net.
"you should have seen jason scott aka "sketch cow" bite it on a segway at defcon this yr. He was doing laps in the lounge area when all of a sudden it lunges forward and jason goes over the front.....it was awesome!!!"
You know, I never thought about O'Hara's book that way... you're right, and I'll be sure to include that in the next book review.
Also, if anyone else (like me) has bouts of gout and need medical assistance getting around the hallways of large conference areas in Las Vegas, I suggest Segway of Las Vegas; they're great people, very friendly, and got me "on the road" in no time at all. Pretty good prices too. Without them, I'd have missed a lot of Defcon.
O'Hara definitely covered phone phreaking. His calls are within the US, and his interest was mostly his Commodore 64 (later PC), but the idea is there.
It takes you back, and it's a good way to put the wife to sleep:)
Now, now. I've seen it used by wives to put husbands to sleep, parents to put children asleep, and I think I fell asleep a few times editing it.
Like, during this one sequence, I remember how they talk about competitions among various speeds of modems to log into multi-line BBSes to play door g...ssnnnk ZZz.zzzzz...
An interesting enough post for me to want to reply to it. I'll include the parent in mine.
"I have not read the book, but I read the article commenting on the book and as a BBS'r and heavy oldtime C64, and early era PC Pirate, WE HATED PEOPLE LIKE THIS IDIOT. I would ban him from a second from my BBS, and from all group affiled BBS's. As a matter of fact as he tells stories of leeching just for being a 'LDer' I can imagin the crap quality of BBS's he was on. P.S. I'll be non -anon coward when I write my book, and maybe I should? Is this guy maing good money for it?"
First of all, it's appreciated that you read the article before commenting. Regarding the situation of O'Hara's behavior on BBSes and whether you would have liked running into him at the time, I think you're missing the point of the book. (Then again, as you said, you didn't read it.) The book is written from the point of view of a 30-something father looking back at his wild(?) youth online, the mistakes he made, the triumphs and sadness that he felt, and how he thought about how things went on. He doesn't flinch at telling you both his good and his bad behavior, how it sometimes catches up to him and sometimes not, and who becomes, stays or stops being his friend. I happen to think this makes the book that much more interesting. "Tales of a world-class troll" or "The History of the Leech" tends to be more readable than "The Elegant Tale of a Non-Boat-Rocking Forum Poster". He does a very good job of explaining his mindset and what humorous and interesting lengths he went to in the pursuit of warez.
I'm sure your book will be better, but until then we have O'Hara's, and that's what we have to go on. Let me know when you've finished yours, I'll review it too.
Appreciated, but I do want to stress that I am very happy people like Rob O'Hara are creating larger or different histories that diverge from the ones I recount in the documentary; the more the merrier.
Granted on the 25 years not being a short time, but it is somewhat rare for 30-somethings to be writing memoirs, and it's usually percieved as happening many years down the road. But yes, the nice thing about BBSing and the like is that people started so early in most cases that by the time they "retired", they were barely out of grad school. Or their 30's.
As for the second part about doubting there was "a lot of living done", in point of fact the book goes into some great detail about the living that was done: his friendships, the travels he took, how he met his wife and started has family, his job, and so on... What he does is wrap these bits of life into how his relationship to BBSes changed over the years, yet still in some ways remained a constant presence. Perhaps he didn't kill a lion or change the face of Jazz, but he definitely did a lot in his lifetime so far and the book reflects it.
If you do a Google Search for "Google's Slogan", all you get is "Don't be Evil". I don't think there's any other known slogan, except maybe "Sorry about that, but it's still in beta."
I'm going to assume this is a mistranscription or a bad editor; otherwise, this is the single greatest thing to come out of Bill Gates' mouth, ever.
While the movie doesn't work for everyone (it's a little arty and a little weird), it has a lot of interview footage with Bob Moog and his unique outlook on life. It's well worth getting and a very dreamy, very loving portrait of the man.
How lucky we are that Fjellestad took this project on.
As you can imagine, doing a documentary on a technical subject is a constant balancing act between focusing on the strengths of the film/video medium and accurately portraying the full breadth of a subject. Nowhere is this more involved than Fidonet, because there were so many interlocking layers of functionality built into the code over a very short period of time.
I have lots of footage on echomail and other aspects of fidonet, but cinematically they would have dragged the episode down. It would have come a laundry list of "alsos" "me toos" and except fors". I have footage of discussions about being an echo coordinator, of being a region coordinator, and being a net coordinator. I have some pretty in-depth discussions of the technical issues of just running a fido. (The "Unfiltered Tom Jennings" bonus feature has some of these level.) All of these will be in the archive collection, so they'll be saved. There's no reason someone couldn't string those together and make a completely different documentary out of them, focused on fidonet's very specific internals.. but I contend it will be a very difficult task to portray it.
Part of the time being taken is that I am editing the interviews for content, removing both conversations I had with the people about getting the sound correctly handled, and places where people were coughing and got up to get some water. So these aren't "raw" and are quite watchable.
That's what's going to take the most time, really.
thanks for the spam Jason! your pc-american centric CRAP documentary is spammed on slashdot, months after its failing release. you blow! -- Anonymous Coward
Don't make me regret the boxes are already printed; that would've gone great on the front cover.
I read this, thinking "how cool", and figured I wouldn't be able to watch it, as I'm deaf, and very few 'grassroots' films/documentaries are subtitled... Imagine my suprise when I RTFA and saw "Subtitles on all Episodes and Footage".
I basically get angry when people don't subtitle their little DVD projects (I buy a lot of independent, REALLY independent DVDs these days) because the problem was, basically, solved.
Subtitle Workshop is 100% free, unbelievably easy to use, and compatible with basically every DVD mastering software out there. There is, very simply, no excuse.
When I asked for more music on top of the mass he had available for download, he was unable to make the time because he was hard at work making a 64k bank-switched Atari 2600 RPG. You could buy an ocean liner on that much geek cred.
People hear his work as the "theme song" of the BBS Documentary; the music was created by hooking a microphone to a dot-matrix printer with a hacked ROM.
I'm privileged to be in any way associated with him.
That said, though, I also felt a few twinges of frustration during portions of the documentary. Probably my biggest "problem" with it was the segment on the ANSI artwork. It seemed like an extrordinary large amount of time was given to interviewing a bunch of younger kids who got in only on the "tail end" of the whole BBS scene, and mistakenly believed their "art groups" held much more significance than they really did in the "grand scheme".
One of the advantages of the size of the DVD set (3 DVDs, 5 and a half hours) was that I could afford to put in episodes or sections dealing with subjects that a shorter documentary (or a single-epsiode one) wouldn't have any way to put in.
Your complaint about going in too deeply on a subject that you yourself do not afford much respect to, is one that echoes here and there with basically all the episodes (except BAUD, which covers the creation of the BBS and people who buy the documentary expect this to be covered).
Fidonet and Artscene, because they're "out there", covering a very specific subject very distinctly, get very passioned positive and negative responses. Naturally, I have been criticized about how the ARTSCENE episode didn't get in-depth enough! And the FIDONET episode is a "best I could do" capturing of an impossibly-large event/movement. You strike at the heart of what I think is one of the real core strengths of the documentary being episodic; some episodes will appeal to different folks, just like BBSes. Imagine if I made it ONE EPISODE.
I mean, when I hit "play" on that portion of the DVD, I was hoping to hear interviews with the creators of the first ANSI art software packages like "The Draw" and "ANSIPaint", and/or more time given to the individual artists who first started offering to make free opening ANSI screens for BBSs around the country. They did talk to "Ebony Eyes" who was another famous ANSI artist from around that time, so that was good. But then the interview immedialtey shifted to this big "story" of the competing art groups like ACiD.... and to me, they were roughly equivalent to "script kiddies" and "warez junkies" anyway.
Ian Davis, creator of "The Draw", is not interesting in discussing or acknowledging his work. I attempted to contact him through third parties who had interviewed him in the past about this subject (and who had great difficulty in even getting him to admit he was "that" Ian Davis). No luck. The creator of ANSI Paint is Drew Olbrich, who worked, interestingly, on "Shrek" and a number of PDI movies; he was supportive of the project but not interested in an interview.
Ebony Eyes was hard to get a hold of as well; she has gone on to a successful career in magazine publishing and has to deal with a constant stream of "media people" trying to get her time. I was lucky and privileged to get time with her to discuss events of a decade and a half earler.
Are you implying that after 1990, the story is "over" and should no longer be discussed? I don't agree, and I like to think the other hours in the films that do cover earlier time periods hold their own.
He's right, though. Jason Scott brags twice about how it's "Creative Commons licensed" as though that's a meaningful statement.
It's meaningful to some people. At the least, it shows I am aware of and acknowledge Creative Commons, which is an important first step.
Anyway -- look out, MPAA! Hundreds of hours of interviews with ex-BBSers? With competition like that on the horizon, the movie studios might as well just shut their doors!
The purpose of the Creative Commons license is not to shut down the movie and media industries; I'm sorry you read it that way. My own reasons for licensing my work Creative Commons were discussed in a statement I made some time ago, but the core reason was "because I want people to enjoy my work and not feel like they're suspects in a criminal case". It's a little more complicated than that, but that's what the statement is for.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wanted to mention how Slashdot never fails to disappoint.
For the record, textfiles.com has no ads. None. Going to it or not going to it doesn't affect my revenue/income particularly. I don't run that site for money.
But if you'd rather hear a much funnier story about the legal threats I get, please watch my video That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars.
That was old school hacking, before "War Games" and people trying to crack computers and security and writing viruses.
You were using your Amiga 1000 before "War Games" came out? That's pretty hardcore, man.
There has long been a disconnect between academic computer security and underground forums like Black Hat and Phrack.
And you know what?
Thank fucking God.
Thank fucking God.
Although I do think it's stretching it to call Black Hat "Underground".
- Jason Scott
Textfiles.com
...die in a fire. A nasty, painful fire.
The article kind of glosses over that time that AOL released its users onto the Internet at large with absolutely no barriers or training, even an indication they were really not on AOL.
One of my funniest memories of that time was when someone had a webpage up criticizing AOL, and an AOL admin/cop/whatever contacted him and seriously explained that the webmaster was violating AOL's terms of service, and to take the webpage down immediately or have his AOL account terminated.
People looking for examples of how a corporate entity will gang-bang a shared service at the first opportunity need look no further than AOL and its toxic bus-load drop-offs onto the net.
Next time, mention that in a "History".
"you should have seen jason scott aka "sketch cow" bite it on a segway at defcon this yr. He was doing laps in the lounge area when all of a sudden it lunges forward and jason goes over the front.....it was awesome!!!"
You know, I never thought about O'Hara's book that way... you're right, and I'll be sure to include that in the next book review.
Also, if anyone else (like me) has bouts of gout and need medical assistance getting around the hallways of large conference areas in Las Vegas, I suggest Segway of Las Vegas; they're great people, very friendly, and got me "on the road" in no time at all. Pretty good prices too. Without them, I'd have missed a lot of Defcon.
O'Hara definitely covered phone phreaking. His calls are within the US, and his interest was mostly his Commodore 64 (later PC), but the idea is there.
It takes you back, and it's a good way to put the wife to sleep :)
Now, now. I've seen it used by wives to put husbands to sleep, parents to put children asleep, and I think I fell asleep a few times editing it.
Like, during this one sequence, I remember how they talk about competitions among various speeds of modems to log into multi-line BBSes to play door g...ssnnnk ZZz.zzzzz...
An interesting enough post for me to want to reply to it. I'll include the parent in mine.
"I have not read the book, but I read the article commenting on the book and as a BBS'r and heavy oldtime C64, and early era PC Pirate, WE HATED PEOPLE LIKE THIS IDIOT. I would ban him from a second from my BBS, and from all group affiled BBS's. As a matter of fact as he tells stories of leeching just for being a 'LDer' I can imagin the crap quality of BBS's he was on. P.S. I'll be non -anon coward when I write my book, and maybe I should? Is this guy maing good money for it?"
First of all, it's appreciated that you read the article before commenting. Regarding the situation of O'Hara's behavior on BBSes and whether you would have liked running into him at the time, I think you're missing the point of the book. (Then again, as you said, you didn't read it.) The book is written from the point of view of a 30-something father looking back at his wild(?) youth online, the mistakes he made, the triumphs and sadness that he felt, and how he thought about how things went on. He doesn't flinch at telling you both his good and his bad behavior, how it sometimes catches up to him and sometimes not, and who becomes, stays or stops being his friend. I happen to think this makes the book that much more interesting. "Tales of a world-class troll" or "The History of the Leech" tends to be more readable than "The Elegant Tale of a Non-Boat-Rocking Forum Poster". He does a very good job of explaining his mindset and what humorous and interesting lengths he went to in the pursuit of warez.
I'm sure your book will be better, but until then we have O'Hara's, and that's what we have to go on. Let me know when you've finished yours, I'll review it too.
Appreciated, but I do want to stress that I am very happy people like Rob O'Hara are creating larger or different histories that diverge from the ones I recount in the documentary; the more the merrier.
Granted on the 25 years not being a short time, but it is somewhat rare for 30-somethings to be writing memoirs, and it's usually percieved as happening many years down the road. But yes, the nice thing about BBSing and the like is that people started so early in most cases that by the time they "retired", they were barely out of grad school. Or their 30's.
As for the second part about doubting there was "a lot of living done", in point of fact the book goes into some great detail about the living that was done: his friendships, the travels he took, how he met his wife and started has family, his job, and so on... What he does is wrap these bits of life into how his relationship to BBSes changed over the years, yet still in some ways remained a constant presence. Perhaps he didn't kill a lion or change the face of Jazz, but he definitely did a lot in his lifetime so far and the book reflects it.
Finally, a review worthy of the top of my weblog!
Yes, but it is accepted that she found the first *computer* bug.
You've seen a nipple? Get off of Slashdot, you're no longer one of us.
compress25
Unfortunately, those are fake/urban myths. (The photo of him isn't fake, but the spinning disk is.)
At least "I'll fucking kill Google" is on legal record. I can live with that.
If you do a Google Search for "Google's Slogan", all you get is "Don't be Evil". I don't think there's any other known slogan, except maybe "Sorry about that, but it's still in beta."
I'm going to assume this is a mistranscription or a bad editor; otherwise, this is the single greatest thing to come out of Bill Gates' mouth, ever.
A documentary about Robert Moog, called simply "Moog", came out last year, directed by Hans Fjellestad. A site about the movie is here:
http://www.zu33.com/moog/
While the movie doesn't work for everyone (it's a little arty and a little weird), it has a lot of interview footage with Bob Moog and his unique outlook on life. It's well worth getting and a very dreamy, very loving portrait of the man.
How lucky we are that Fjellestad took this project on.
Hey there, Jeff.
As you can imagine, doing a documentary on a technical subject is a constant balancing act between focusing on the strengths of the film/video medium and accurately portraying the full breadth of a subject. Nowhere is this more involved than Fidonet, because there were so many interlocking layers of functionality built into the code over a very short period of time.
I have lots of footage on echomail and other aspects of fidonet, but cinematically they would have dragged the episode down. It would have come a laundry list of "alsos" "me toos" and except fors". I have footage of discussions about being an echo coordinator, of being a region coordinator, and being a net coordinator. I have some pretty in-depth discussions of the technical issues of just running a fido. (The "Unfiltered Tom Jennings" bonus feature has some of these level.) All of these will be in the archive collection, so they'll be saved. There's no reason someone couldn't string those together and make a completely different documentary out of them, focused on fidonet's very specific internals.. but I contend it will be a very difficult task to portray it.
Part of the time being taken is that I am editing the interviews for content, removing both conversations I had with the people about getting the sound correctly handled, and places where people were coughing and got up to get some water. So these aren't "raw" and are quite watchable.
That's what's going to take the most time, really.
thanks for the spam Jason! your pc-american centric CRAP documentary is spammed on slashdot, months after its failing release. you blow! -- Anonymous Coward
Don't make me regret the boxes are already printed; that would've gone great on the front cover.
I read this, thinking "how cool", and figured I wouldn't be able to watch it, as I'm deaf, and very few 'grassroots' films/documentaries are subtitled... Imagine my suprise when I RTFA and saw "Subtitles on all Episodes and Footage".
I basically get angry when people don't subtitle their little DVD projects (I buy a lot of independent, REALLY independent DVDs these days) because the problem was, basically, solved.
Subtitle Workshop is 100% free, unbelievably easy to use, and compatible with basically every DVD mastering software out there. There is, very simply, no excuse.
call these new BBS documentary parts PODCASTS!
(Slaps Forehead)
Paul Slocum is the fuckin' MAN.
When I asked for more music on top of the mass he had available for download, he was unable to make the time because he was hard at work making a 64k bank-switched Atari 2600 RPG. You could buy an ocean liner on that much geek cred.
People hear his work as the "theme song" of the BBS Documentary; the music was created by hooking a microphone to a dot-matrix printer with a hacked ROM.
I'm privileged to be in any way associated with him.
That said, though, I also felt a few twinges of frustration during portions of the documentary. Probably my biggest "problem" with it was the segment on the ANSI artwork. It seemed like an extrordinary large amount of time was given to interviewing a bunch of younger kids who got in only on the "tail end" of the whole BBS scene, and mistakenly believed their "art groups" held much more significance than they really did in the "grand scheme".
.... and to me, they were roughly equivalent to "script kiddies" and "warez junkies" anyway.
One of the advantages of the size of the DVD set (3 DVDs, 5 and a half hours) was that I could afford to put in episodes or sections dealing with subjects that a shorter documentary (or a single-epsiode one) wouldn't have any way to put in.
Your complaint about going in too deeply on a subject that you yourself do not afford much respect to, is one that echoes here and there with basically all the episodes (except BAUD, which covers the creation of the BBS and people who buy the documentary expect this to be covered).
Fidonet and Artscene, because they're "out there", covering a very specific subject very distinctly, get very passioned positive and negative responses. Naturally, I have been criticized about how the ARTSCENE episode didn't get in-depth enough! And the FIDONET episode is a "best I could do" capturing of an impossibly-large event/movement. You strike at the heart of what I think is one of the real core strengths of the documentary being episodic; some episodes will appeal to different folks, just like BBSes. Imagine if I made it ONE EPISODE.
I mean, when I hit "play" on that portion of the DVD, I was hoping to hear interviews with the creators of the first ANSI art software packages like "The Draw" and "ANSIPaint", and/or more time given to the individual artists who first started offering to make free opening ANSI screens for BBSs around the country. They did talk to "Ebony Eyes" who was another famous ANSI artist from around that time, so that was good. But then the interview immedialtey shifted to this big "story" of the competing art groups like ACiD
Ian Davis, creator of "The Draw", is not interesting in discussing or acknowledging his work. I attempted to contact him through third parties who had interviewed him in the past about this subject (and who had great difficulty in even getting him to admit he was "that" Ian Davis). No luck. The creator of ANSI Paint is Drew Olbrich, who worked, interestingly, on "Shrek" and a number of PDI movies; he was supportive of the project but not interested in an interview.
Ebony Eyes was hard to get a hold of as well; she has gone on to a successful career in magazine publishing and has to deal with a constant stream of "media people" trying to get her time. I was lucky and privileged to get time with her to discuss events of a decade and a half earler.
Are you implying that after 1990, the story is "over" and should no longer be discussed? I don't agree, and I like to think the other hours in the films that do cover earlier time periods hold their own.
He's right, though. Jason Scott brags twice about how it's "Creative Commons licensed" as though that's a meaningful statement.
It's meaningful to some people. At the least, it shows I am aware of and acknowledge Creative Commons, which is an important first step.
Anyway -- look out, MPAA! Hundreds of hours of interviews with ex-BBSers? With competition like that on the horizon, the movie studios might as well just shut their doors!
The purpose of the Creative Commons license is not to shut down the movie and media industries; I'm sorry you read it that way. My own reasons for licensing my work Creative Commons were discussed in a statement I made some time ago, but the core reason was "because I want people to enjoy my work and not feel like they're suspects in a criminal case". It's a little more complicated than that, but that's what the statement is for.