This is a documentary. Does anyone want to argue that a healthy share of disk space on BBS systems wasn't devoted to "dirty" pictures? Does the documentary not mention that? I'd think it was worth at least some acknowledgement. It's, um, the truth?
The episode entitled "Make it Pay" covers some of the aspects of how dirty pictures represented an easy way to make fast cash on BBSes, accompanied by a few dozen advertisements I found for "adult" BBSes, and reactions by some people to this fact.
Just for the record, my 5 and a half hour documentary (8 episodes, 3 DVDs) on Dial Up Bulletin Board Systems, which is hereand can be ordered here was licensed Creative Commons. Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike, even. And it's done me very well indeed. Financially, personally, and socially.
I'll gladly speak to any group about how I turned a profit in less than a few weeks by doing this.
Like many people, I like to ensure that the links to slashdot stories are as speedy and dependable as possible. In those situations where a file or site is loading in a slower fashion than is acceptable, I might even mirror or offer some alterative links to the same information.
In my process of "verifying" the footage in this story, I found all the links slow, and the movies taking forever to load. I am disappointed at how long it will take me to "verify" this footage.
My jury is still out at the root cause of this problem, but there is a current first-draft hypothesis that an article with the words SEX, INVESTIGATION, and GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS that links to a video of characters having sex might be a contributing factor.
If someone could send me a copy of the file in question, I will be able to verify this myself, and then produce a further conclusion within a few days. Thanks.
No matter how many people I interviewed, and no matter how many years I spent travelling, there would always be people who I missed.
Instead of looking at it like a scorecard, let's take a look at it as representatives of people who I interviewed.
A large number of folks are "just folks". I interviewed them because they'd used a BBS, didn't necessarily lord over any subject or empire, but just used them for a good number of years. I wanted the documentary to have a sense of their side of things because that's what BBSes were, collections of "just folks".
Of course, I wanted movers and shakers as well, so I took some time to interview people who have some relative amount of fame. To that end, archetypes or sets of folks are in the documentary as well.
For example, under authors of BBS programs, we have the authors of WWIV, PC-BOARD, MajorBBS, Wildcat!, Synchronet, Spence, Fidonet, PunterNet, CBBS, b0badel, Opus, TBBS, and others.
I have people who ran large BBSes, people who ran small ones, people who turned into ISPs, people who refused to turn into ISPs. I have the editor of Boardwatch magazine and the creator of.QWK packets. I have Apple II crackers, computer collectors, people who got married because of their BBS and people who lost their livelihoods because of BBSes.
Of the people on your list, I spoke to roughly half, either on the phone or in e-mail.
In some cases, they were just not available. Seth Able lives in Japan, for example. Others, I simply could not afford to travel to their remote location when there was nobody nearby. In the case of Vince Perriello, when I came through his area of the country, the meeting he was to come to was on the night of an ice storm and it would have been dangerous for him to come to Ken Kaplan's house. Sometimes, it was as simple as that.
For the two hundred people interviewed, I spoke to roughly three thousand others over the last four years. Their ideas and thoughts came with me for the questions I asked the interviewees.
I was fully aware that no matter how far I travelled, how many people I interviewed, and how huge and long the thing would be, someone would come out, point, and go 'you missed a spot'. You won't be the last, I am sure.
Hi, everyone. I find the best thing to do with Slashdot discussions if something you've done is the center of it is to wait out the initial wave, find the general questions people are asking about that they can be told without visiting the site, and answer as best I can. Obviously, the website itself has answers in more detail.
So here we go.
As most people figured out, it's a multi-episode collection, not a single documentary. That would be insane and pretty unwatchable. There are 8 episodes, covering everything from Fidonet to ANSI to hacking/phreaking BBSes to the BBS Industry (think Boardwatch, Mustang, Galacticomm, PC-Board, and so on). Each of these are of varying length from 20 to 40 minutes, and go into their own subjects with slightly different styles.
The documentary is subtitled. All of it. All episodes, all bonus footage, all easter eggs, you name it. Subtitled, period. I don't think it's right to put out a DVD that isn't. Some of these episodes have second or third subtitle tracks with 'non-technical' subtitles.
There are commentary or statements on pretty much all the episodes. There are easter eggs, as mentioned. There is a DVD-ROM with thousands of photographs and a few speeches I've given on history. There is a lot of stuff.
$50 is steep for some people, and not steep for others. I've now spent 10 percent of my life so far making this film, interviewed 205 people, travelled thousands of miles over years, and spent a year editing the resulting 250 hours down to the works on the DVD. I am asking, in return, $50.
Releasing the DVD as a Creative Commons work is less about encouraging people to "not pay" and more about treating my audience with respect. The thought of threatening people with jail because they shared copies of my movies absolutely revulses me. People will watch and pay or not watch and pay but it's a lot more important to me that they WATCH than anything else. If my story of making the production, my willingness to autograph any copies you buy, and the hard work I put into designing the packaging isn't sufficient to make it worth buying for you, so be it. I'd rather you at least heard what it had to say. Additionally, I encourage people who think I did the documentary "wrong" to use the documentary as source material and make a new one.
By the way, a lot of the raw footage will be released to the public under the same license. That will result in a body of work well into the dozens (and perhaps hundreds) of hours.
It was a nice surprise to see this documentary slashdotted by someone else before I had a chance to mention it. I am very touched. And a big thanks to everyone who has bought or is buying a copy. I appreciate that very much.
I should correct this and say that it is subtitled, not captioned. That might make a difference to some people.
I resolved, after interviewing one subject who was deaf, that she would be able to enjoy the work as anyone else. So everything is subtitled. Everything. All the bonus footage, the easter eggs, the episodes themselves.
Subtitle software is very, very easy to use these days. I used a product called Subtitle Workshop. It's free, and it was relatively painless to do the entire disc (although with basically 7 hours of material, I spent a lot of time proof-reading).
I can only give my word that I did not submit this story to Slashdot. I would have submitted a story eventually, but not this evening, and not until I was done shipping out all my pre-orders.
You are therefore falsely accusing me of impersonating someone to "hide" my identity while submitting a story about myself.
They fear the "Hollywood-ization" of the Gaming Industry?
What, is it 1985? Even by the middle of the 1980s, budgets were being blown on insanely stupid ideas trying to keep up with movies, buying movie licenses or paying stupid development costs to make the next Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.
ALL of the game companies, and I mean ALL: Atari, Taito, Nintendo, Gottlieb... they all spent TONS of money developing INSANELY dumb games trying to get blockbusters instead of focusing on good gameplay and letting people work out games other ways.
This is nothing new; just another article acting like there's something shiny and dew-like under the sun.
The Gaming Industry has been polluted for decades.
.... I would pay good money to see an article about the making of Donkey Kong 3. I would love to know, conclusively, what set of decisions and approaches could take the Donkey Kong property and totally drive it into the ground like an oil drilling expedition.
I spent some time consulting with my staff over where the source of your issues came from, regarding notacon's quality. After checking the location of the Holiday Inn and consulting my star chart, I think we've been able to triage your issues.
It's not usually known, but when you have a number of cosmic arrangements, specifically the pyramid shape of the nearby Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame and the metal plate in Nick Farr's head, something that is commonly referred to as a "dimensional rift" occurs. Unlike the cinematic portrayals of this rift (which are WAY off base, by the way), there is usually not a burst of orchestra music and vibrating white light. Instead, doors and hallways seem pretty much the same, although if your mind is open you can see it immediately. Closed minds, structured as they are to find the bad in everything and to look at the world as a big loving silver platter waiting for them to grab with thier chubby, slick fingers, will walk around unawares for a good amount of time.
Were you to not have gone through this portal, I suspect you would have seen Notacon as it was: a combination of talks, social gathering, and events stretching far into the night. For my own part, I recall a particularly good poker game played with a number of intelligent people, conversation topics flailing about like a trauma victim and the pot slowly rising between us. Of course, the real currency in that game were the ideas, but I digress.
In the actual reality of notacon, I happily attended a number of excellent talks, including my own. This is good, because my lack of attendance would have surely brought the talk down to the level that you experienced in NotNotacon, the portal dimension we figure you were in. The next time you think you might be there, check the labels of Snapple Iced Tea: they're blue instead of a brown-yellow mix.
My own talk, which is up for enjoyment both here and here, covered an excellent example of the merging of at and technology in what is commonly known as the ANSI art scene. I like to think we were engaging, multi-media, and intense. Of course, in the NotNotacon dimension, I believe our talk was replaced with a riveting account of ordering a sandwich. C'est la vie, as we say in the metaphysical sciences.
What concerns me, of course, is that, like your unawareness of the dimensional portal you found yourself in, you've been unable to give examples of conventions that NotNotacon can aspire to. Surely, giving helpful information instead of a litany of wild-eyed negatives will improve the world at large, if for no other reason than to gain the vital "Junior J. Junior III" market often described in articles in "Hacker Convention Monthly".
My staff at textfiles.com and I send our condolences that you spent your 5-hour jaunt in the alternate dimension and hope that your open-mind exercises will prevent this sad occurrence from happening in the future.
I waited until the traffic died down, to say that while I appreciate the ingenuity with the use of a projector (and there's lots of others cool things this approach could take), this is hardly the "Ultimate RPG Table".
I am taken with how much effort and thought the creator of that table put together in planning, executing, and documenting his work. Truly, it's a work of art and quality far beyond a simple application of an LCD projector.
Best of all, it's a version 1.0 and additional refinements are to come.
Disclaimer: I don't play any of this stuff, but I know quality when I see it.
The way that it's going to work is that the radio station will incorporate some of the talks, depending on a number of factors. The priority schedule works this way:
1. Content created for or by Notacon 2. Content created for NotaconRadio 3. Pre-recorded content created for NotaconRadio 4.
We're not going to do music shows, but otherwise it will be a wide variety of stuff, going for 63 straight hours. Write me for more details.
Quite true. I was more or less taking the opportunity of a small surge of reinterest in first-generation EA games to remember someone who helped make EA happen.
Haven't been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, have you? I reccommend seeing what they have and where they're going with it.
Does this nelson guy look as retarded as ESR does?
Russ Nelson is one of the most steady-handed, brilliant, helpful people I've ever had the pleasure to know. I've been involved in small projects with him over the last decade and in every case, if static was being generated, it sure wasn't from Russ' corner.
I think people will be amazed at Russ' wisdom and even hand at making his opinion known or guiding the conversation/productiveness of any projects he leads. He is a uniter.
Any group that has him involved, is a lucky group indeed.
And he looks like a librarian. A really, really cool librarian.
Well, we can go around and around on that. Obviously, if they have no entry fee and can take most anything shoved in, they're run kind of ad-hoc and probably rather arbitrarily. I would leave it at your essay and then move on, really. The world is full of podunk festivals, contests, "certifications", and other such constructions that end up being rather inside, arbitrary, or not-to-snuff. I'd let the game speak for itself. I'd also put some screenshots up on your site.
All this said, however... you run the fuckin' MODARCHIVE. You RULE, and get bonus points beyond all reason for doing so. I run artscene.textfiles.com, which has a mod section, but really, I know where to bow down. And for you, I do. Let me know if I can be a mirror.
I found a separate site which seems to provide a 0.2 beta for the game, possibly for the judges' use. This beta page has links to a ~limebird type account, which is what I assume they meant by a server they could see the logs of.
If true, yes, it's troubling, since ostensibly anything that gets a successful entry in at least should be viewed, even if a few seconds of viewing reveal you've got a non-winner. You have to at least see it to dismiss it properly.
Since LimeBird/Velox has a little bit of notoriety about this now, I would suggest moving on, and continuing to work on the game, since it's very easy to go from "That game made by those guys screwed over in the IGF" to "That game made by those guys who whine about how they get screwed over."
There'll be a torrent again. I am very focused on finishing the BBS Documentary, and when that is done I'll be doing the appropriate things with textfiles.com for the current era. (Torrent downloads, RSS feed, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is a documentary. Does anyone want to argue that a healthy share of disk space on BBS systems wasn't devoted to "dirty" pictures? Does the documentary not mention that? I'd think it was worth at least some acknowledgement. It's, um, the truth?
The episode entitled "Make it Pay" covers some of the aspects of how dirty pictures represented an easy way to make fast cash on BBSes, accompanied by a few dozen advertisements I found for "adult" BBSes, and reactions by some people to this fact.
Just for the record, my 5 and a half hour documentary (8 episodes, 3 DVDs) on Dial Up Bulletin Board Systems, which is here and can be ordered here was licensed Creative Commons. Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike, even. And it's done me very well indeed. Financially, personally, and socially.
I'll gladly speak to any group about how I turned a profit in less than a few weeks by doing this.
In fact, just feel free to read the massive essay I wrote about why Creative Commons worked for me.
Dvorak can suck an egg.
Like many people, I like to ensure that the links to slashdot stories are as speedy and dependable as possible. In those situations where a file or site is loading in a slower fashion than is acceptable, I might even mirror or offer some alterative links to the same information.
In my process of "verifying" the footage in this story, I found all the links slow, and the movies taking forever to load. I am disappointed at how long it will take me to "verify" this footage.
My jury is still out at the root cause of this problem, but there is a current first-draft hypothesis that an article with the words SEX, INVESTIGATION, and GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS that links to a video of characters having sex might be a contributing factor.
If someone could send me a copy of the file in question, I will be able to verify this myself, and then produce a further conclusion within a few days. Thanks.
No matter how many people I interviewed, and no matter how many years I spent travelling, there would always be people who I missed.
.QWK packets. I have Apple II crackers, computer collectors, people who got married because of their BBS and people who lost their livelihoods because of BBSes.
Instead of looking at it like a scorecard, let's take a look at it as representatives of people who I interviewed.
A large number of folks are "just folks". I interviewed them because they'd used a BBS, didn't necessarily lord over any subject or empire, but just used them for a good number of years. I wanted the documentary to have a sense of their side of things because that's what BBSes were, collections of "just folks".
Of course, I wanted movers and shakers as well, so I took some time to interview people who have some relative amount of fame. To that end, archetypes or sets of folks are in the documentary as well.
For example, under authors of BBS programs, we have the authors of WWIV, PC-BOARD, MajorBBS, Wildcat!, Synchronet, Spence, Fidonet, PunterNet, CBBS, b0badel, Opus, TBBS, and others.
I have people who ran large BBSes, people who ran small ones, people who turned into ISPs, people who refused to turn into ISPs. I have the editor of Boardwatch magazine and the creator of
Of the people on your list, I spoke to roughly half, either on the phone or in e-mail.
In some cases, they were just not available. Seth Able lives in Japan, for example. Others, I simply could not afford to travel to their remote location when there was nobody nearby. In the case of Vince Perriello, when I came through his area of the country, the meeting he was to come to was on the night of an ice storm and it would have been dangerous for him to come to Ken Kaplan's house. Sometimes, it was as simple as that.
For the two hundred people interviewed, I spoke to roughly three thousand others over the last four years. Their ideas and thoughts came with me for the questions I asked the interviewees.
I was fully aware that no matter how far I travelled, how many people I interviewed, and how huge and long the thing would be, someone would come out, point, and go 'you missed a spot'. You won't be the last, I am sure.
It's like an AE line, except with a message base.
PW=KILL
Hi, everyone. I find the best thing to do with Slashdot discussions if something you've done is the center of it is to wait out the initial wave, find the general questions people are asking about that they can be told without visiting the site, and answer as best I can. Obviously, the website itself has answers in more detail.
So here we go.
As most people figured out, it's a multi-episode collection, not a single documentary. That would be insane and pretty unwatchable. There are 8 episodes, covering everything from Fidonet to ANSI to hacking/phreaking BBSes to the BBS Industry (think Boardwatch, Mustang, Galacticomm, PC-Board, and so on). Each of these are of varying length from 20 to 40 minutes, and go into their own subjects with slightly different styles.
The documentary is subtitled. All of it. All episodes, all bonus footage, all easter eggs, you name it. Subtitled, period. I don't think it's right to put out a DVD that isn't. Some of these episodes have second or third subtitle tracks with 'non-technical' subtitles.
There are commentary or statements on pretty much all the episodes. There are easter eggs, as mentioned. There is a DVD-ROM with thousands of photographs and a few speeches I've given on history. There is a lot of stuff.
$50 is steep for some people, and not steep for others. I've now spent 10 percent of my life so far making this film, interviewed 205 people, travelled thousands of miles over years, and spent a year editing the resulting 250 hours down to the works on the DVD. I am asking, in return, $50.
Releasing the DVD as a Creative Commons work is less about encouraging people to "not pay" and more about treating my audience with respect. The thought of threatening people with jail because they shared copies of my movies absolutely revulses me. People will watch and pay or not watch and pay but it's a lot more important to me that they WATCH than anything else. If my story of making the production, my willingness to autograph any copies you buy, and the hard work I put into designing the packaging isn't sufficient to make it worth buying for you, so be it. I'd rather you at least heard what it had to say. Additionally, I encourage people who think I did the documentary "wrong" to use the documentary as source material and make a new one.
By the way, a lot of the raw footage will be released to the public under the same license. That will result in a body of work well into the dozens (and perhaps hundreds) of hours.
It was a nice surprise to see this documentary slashdotted by someone else before I had a chance to mention it. I am very touched. And a big thanks to everyone who has bought or is buying a copy. I appreciate that very much.
Yes. It is captioned.
I should correct this and say that it is subtitled, not captioned. That might make a difference to some people.
I resolved, after interviewing one subject who was deaf, that she would be able to enjoy the work as anyone else. So everything is subtitled. Everything. All the bonus footage, the easter eggs, the episodes themselves.
Subtitle software is very, very easy to use these days. I used a product called Subtitle Workshop. It's free, and it was relatively painless to do the entire disc (although with basically 7 hours of material, I spent a lot of time proof-reading).
I can only give my word that I did not submit this story to Slashdot. I would have submitted a story eventually, but not this evening, and not until I was done shipping out all my pre-orders.
You are therefore falsely accusing me of impersonating someone to "hide" my identity while submitting a story about myself.
Except I don't do that.
I never feel the need to do that.
I don't have to do that.
Now sit down and keep your false charges to yourself unless you have actual evidence to the contrary.
Your quest was successful, Art; the episode entitled "NO CARRIER" has a sequence with you explaining in great detail that BBSes are not dead.
It is a Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike 2.0 license.
They fear the "Hollywood-ization" of the Gaming Industry?
What, is it 1985? Even by the middle of the 1980s, budgets were being blown on insanely stupid ideas trying to keep up with movies, buying movie licenses or paying stupid development costs to make the next Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.
ALL of the game companies, and I mean ALL: Atari, Taito, Nintendo, Gottlieb... they all spent TONS of money developing INSANELY dumb games trying to get blockbusters instead of focusing on good gameplay and letting people work out games other ways.
This is nothing new; just another article acting like there's something shiny and dew-like under the sun.
The Gaming Industry has been polluted for decades.
.... I would pay good money to see an article about the making of Donkey Kong 3. I would love to know, conclusively, what set of decisions and approaches could take the Donkey Kong property and totally drive it into the ground like an oil drilling expedition.
I spent some time consulting with my staff over where the source of your issues came from, regarding notacon's quality. After checking the location of the Holiday Inn and consulting my star chart, I think we've been able to triage your issues.
It's not usually known, but when you have a number of cosmic arrangements, specifically the pyramid shape of the nearby Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame and the metal plate in Nick Farr's head, something that is commonly referred to as a "dimensional rift" occurs. Unlike the cinematic portrayals of this rift (which are WAY off base, by the way), there is usually not a burst of orchestra music and vibrating white light. Instead, doors and hallways seem pretty much the same, although if your mind is open you can see it immediately. Closed minds, structured as they are to find the bad in everything and to look at the world as a big loving silver platter waiting for them to grab with thier chubby, slick fingers, will walk around unawares for a good amount of time.
Were you to not have gone through this portal, I suspect you would have seen Notacon as it was: a combination of talks, social gathering, and events stretching far into the night. For my own part, I recall a particularly good poker game played with a number of intelligent people, conversation topics flailing about like a trauma victim and the pot slowly rising between us. Of course, the real currency in that game were the ideas, but I digress.
In the actual reality of notacon, I happily attended a number of excellent talks, including my own. This is good, because my lack of attendance would have surely brought the talk down to the level that you experienced in NotNotacon, the portal dimension we figure you were in. The next time you think you might be there, check the labels of Snapple Iced Tea: they're blue instead of a brown-yellow mix.
My own talk, which is up for enjoyment both here and here, covered an excellent example of the merging of at and technology in what is commonly known as the ANSI art scene. I like to think we were engaging, multi-media, and intense. Of course, in the NotNotacon dimension, I believe our talk was replaced with a riveting account of ordering a sandwich. C'est la vie, as we say in the metaphysical sciences.
What concerns me, of course, is that, like your unawareness of the dimensional portal you found yourself in, you've been unable to give examples of conventions that NotNotacon can aspire to. Surely, giving helpful information instead of a litany of wild-eyed negatives will improve the world at large, if for no other reason than to gain the vital "Junior J. Junior III" market often described in articles in "Hacker Convention Monthly".
My staff at textfiles.com and I send our condolences that you spent your 5-hour jaunt in the alternate dimension and hope that your open-mind exercises will prevent this sad occurrence from happening in the future.
I waited until the traffic died down, to say that while I appreciate the ingenuity with the use of a projector (and there's lots of others cool things this approach could take), this is hardly the "Ultimate RPG Table".
No, my friends, this is the ultimate RPG table.
I am taken with how much effort and thought the creator of that table put together in planning, executing, and documenting his work. Truly, it's a work of art and quality far beyond a simple application of an LCD projector.
Best of all, it's a version 1.0 and additional refinements are to come.
Disclaimer: I don't play any of this stuff, but I know quality when I see it.
The way that it's going to work is that the radio station will incorporate some of the talks, depending on a number of factors. The priority schedule works this way:
1. Content created for or by Notacon
2. Content created for NotaconRadio
3. Pre-recorded content created for NotaconRadio
4.
We're not going to do music shows, but otherwise it will be a wide variety of stuff, going for 63 straight hours. Write me for more details.
Quite true. I was more or less taking the opportunity of a small surge of reinterest in first-generation EA games to remember someone who helped make EA happen.
.... Danielle Bunten.
Haven't been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, have you? I reccommend seeing what they have and where they're going with it.
As well you should! That is how I mean it, understated self-security and rock-like perseverance.
:)
And now how are we going to get these hand-marks off our respective backs?
Does this nelson guy look as retarded as ESR does?
Russ Nelson is one of the most steady-handed, brilliant, helpful people I've ever had the pleasure to know. I've been involved in small projects with him over the last decade and in every case, if static was being generated, it sure wasn't from Russ' corner.
I think people will be amazed at Russ' wisdom and even hand at making his opinion known or guiding the conversation/productiveness of any projects he leads. He is a uniter.
Any group that has him involved, is a lucky group indeed.
And he looks like a librarian. A really, really cool librarian.
Well, we can go around and around on that. Obviously, if they have no entry fee and can take most anything shoved in, they're run kind of ad-hoc and probably rather arbitrarily. I would leave it at your essay and then move on, really. The world is full of podunk festivals, contests, "certifications", and other such constructions that end up being rather inside, arbitrary, or not-to-snuff. I'd let the game speak for itself. I'd also put some screenshots up on your site.
All this said, however... you run the fuckin' MODARCHIVE. You RULE, and get bonus points beyond all reason for doing so. I run artscene.textfiles.com, which has a mod section, but really, I know where to bow down. And for you, I do. Let me know if I can be a mirror.
I found a separate site which seems to provide a 0.2 beta for the game, possibly for the judges' use. This beta page has links to a ~limebird type account, which is what I assume they meant by a server they could see the logs of.
If true, yes, it's troubling, since ostensibly anything that gets a successful entry in at least should be viewed, even if a few seconds of viewing reveal you've got a non-winner. You have to at least see it to dismiss it properly.
Since LimeBird/Velox has a little bit of notoriety about this now, I would suggest moving on, and continuing to work on the game, since it's very easy to go from "That game made by those guys screwed over in the IGF" to "That game made by those guys who whine about how they get screwed over."
There'll be a torrent again. I am very focused on finishing the BBS Documentary, and when that is done I'll be doing the appropriate things with textfiles.com for the current era. (Torrent downloads, RSS feed, etc.)
Stay tuned. Or at least, stick around.
An overview of the never-into-production 1450XLD.
Why not start out paying attention to Hacker Media?
http://www.hackermedia.net
You have hacker radio shows and even some TV shows. Check it out.