I'm working on a couple larger projects at the moment which I should be able to announce soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a very rare recording I found on Big O Magazine's always-excellent ROIO of the Week (Recordings of Indeterminate Origin).

These are the unreleased demos from Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns, one of my favorite albums ever. Unlike the lush arrangements found on the album, these early versions are stripped down to only piano, and acoustic guitar. It's like Hissing of Summer Lawns in the style of Blue or For the Roses. At the time of its 1975 release, The Hissing of Summer Lawns was panned by critics unhappy with her shift towards jazz/folk/rock fusion. I doubt they would've complained if these demos were the final cuts.

The Seeding of Summer Lawns

01. Harry's House/Centerpiece
02. Edith and the Kingpin
03. In France They Kiss on Main Street
04. Sweet Bird
05. Shade of Scarlett Conquering
06. Shadows and Light
07. Dreamland (later released on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter)
08. The Boho Dance
09. Hunter (unreleased demo from Blue sessions)

As I mentioned, I found these on Big O Zine. That site is an odd cookie, the web presence of a long-running music magazine in Singapore with no less than four active domain names that redirect to each other in strange ways. The navigation is obscure and each page on the massive site is created manually in Dreamweaver, so it feels like a throwback to online zines from the mid-1990s. There's no homepage for the ROIO of the Week, so your best bet is finding the most recent ROIO of the Week on the homepage and skimming the hand-edited list of archives from there.

But man, what a resource. Not confining themselves to just live bootlegs, Big O posts demos, alternate studio sessions, and other extreme rarities from classic and current artists. (For example, Steely Dan's Royal Scam Outtakes, Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball outtakes, Barry Gibb's unreleased 1970 album, Jeff Buckley's Grace outtakes, and Janis Joplin's 1964 audition tapes.) But you need to be quick: they're usually removed within a week or two. The Joni bootleg was removed from their site, but this is so great, I'm giving it a permanent home so it can be heard by a wider audience.

It's almost been five years since the Santa Monica Farmer's Market tragedy, when an 86-year-old man accidentally took the lives of ten unsuspecting people with his burgundy Buick LeSabre. I was there, and documented the aftermath in real-time.

This morning, at around 2am, I received an anonymous comment on that entry from someone who survived. It's a haunting glimpse into the experience of cheating death.

From: vancouverite

When it's not your day to die, it's just not your day to die.

I was there that day. Right there. My son was less than a year old at the time and it was a rarity that he and his father stayed home that day, they'd normally be rushing me along impatiently.

So I was dawdling, perusing the lovely organic greens and the beautiful melons, working my way up one side of the street stalls and back down the other.

I am only alive because at that moment, I was looking at Meyer lemons instead of arugula.

It started with a loud, continuous screeching/scraping noise, and then loud boombangs (the screeching turned out to be the upright poles of the display tents and the tables being dragged across the road surface, the bangs being those structures falling).

A young couple standing next to me at the lemons stand joined me in glancing up the street towards the growing cacophony that was heading our way. He gently moved in front of her, shielding her with his body instinctively as the disaster careened mere inches from us. We were so close I'm sure I could have touched the vehicle if I reached my arm out.

My first and only thought was to get home to my child as fast as I possibly could, everything else was suspended in time. I realized I had never let go of my 4 bags of produce. I looked down and saw red smeared on my legs. It seemed to be a combination of strawberries, raspberries, tomato and perhaps blood.

One minute I remember feeling jealous of a pretty slim girl with Manolo mules on talking on her cell phone. I can clearly remember seeing one of those perfect shoes lying sideways in the middle of the road with no idea where its wearer was who was right in front of me just a moment ago.

I remember the middle-aged black woman, separated from her teen daughter, distraught and focussed simultaneously as only a mother can be. I'll never forget the raw sound of relief she uttered as she found and embraced her daughter a few moments later.

Worst of all, I remember being so close to him in his car, I could see the bodies, one under, one on the hood, and the utter chaos moving along in slow motion. The image of his face with his glasses askew will haunt me for the rest of my life. I could have sworn he looked right at me, he wasn't even looking forward through the smashed windshield.

I remember the man running after the car crying and yelling "he just killed my wife".

Just today, the accident invaded my life again. As I drove back to my downtown office this afternoon, the pedestrian traffic was quite heavy, and I thought to myself, as I have now and again since that day, "I know exactly what it would look and sound and be like if someone were to just plow through these people".

I think about everyone that was there that day and have often wished for just one chance to get together to share our compartmentalized grief, to tell our stories, and to comfort one another in a way noone else can.

Excerpt of a letter sent to a grade-school friend in September 1993. I was 16.

I got a new computer...an IBM 386. It's a beauty of a computer, but I sunk all of my money into it and my parents still had to help pay it off... It has an 80 meg Hard Drive, a Super VGA card (not a monitor though, still stuck with VGA...), a brand new keyboard and mouse, 4 megs expanded memory, a High Density 3.5" and 5 1/4" drive. Cost about $800 but it was worth it. I consider it an investment for college. I plan to major in Computer Science in college with maybe a Psychology minor.

Have you ever heard of Virtual Reality? Of course you have... If by some odd chance you haven't, take a look into it. I'm telling you, it WILL be bigger than TV. I hope to get into it as soon as I can. Come to think of it, you should too.

This is the danger of keeping a digital record of everything you've ever written.

ForumWarz is my newest obsession, a web-based game like nothing I've ever played. In short, it's a parody of Internet culture in the form of a real-time role-playing game. You play as one of three Internet archetypes -- the camwhore, emo kid, or troll -- and try to disrupt message boards any way you can, using your sexuality, bad poetry, cross-site scripting attacks, or simply banging your head on the keyboard. In the process, you'll meet a large cast of strange characters who will send you on missions in a very funny microcosm of the Internet.

Among those parodied: Furries, Google, script kiddies, Boing Boing, Apple Computer, ricers, 4chan, Ron Paul, gamers, Bill O'Reilly, Tubgirl, otaku, and the Church of Scientology. Also, it's almost certainly the only game to include a text-adventure minigame based on R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet." This game isn't for everyone.

Before reading any further, I'd highly recommend trying the first two or three levels. Warning: If you're easily offended, this game is not for you. And don't worry about getting stuck with the Jimmy character during the tutorial; you get to choose a username, avatar, and class when you hit level 2.

At the risk of turning Waxy into a Jonathan Coulton fan site, he performed a short set at the Valve Software's Steam Party capped by a finale of "Still Alive" performed on Rock Band, backed by the Harmonix developers on guitar and drums.

I'm pretty sure this is the only published photo of their final score, a 5-star performance:

And yes, Coulton sang his own song on "Easy." (Afterwards, he said the Harmonix guys lowered the difficulty because thought the crowd noise would mess it up.)

Shortly after the set, I saw a tipsy geek hop on stage to copy the unreleased song from the Xbox 360 with a USB key before a Harmonix team member tackled him. I discovered he wrote up the story this morning, which was a fun read.

I'm mostly a casual spectator of the gaming industry, with my experience limited to being a fan, so it's been a delight to meet the people behind the games I love at GDC. At the same time, I've felt a kinship with these indie developers, having worked as a developer (and accidental entrepreneur) in the web industry for the last ten years.

One of the most jarring and frustrating differences I've seen between the web and gaming worlds is the dominance of middle-men: publishers and platforms trying to control the distribution of games. In the web industry, there's nobody controlling distribution and I don't need anyone's authorization to launch a new project. But the gaming industry is dominated by gatekeepers. For consoles, you can pay through the nose for the privilege to be on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network or the upcoming WiiWare, and then wait months to be released into the pipeline. On PCs, there's no clear monopoly, with distribution fragmented between a handful of game download portals and distribution frameworks like Steam.

Or you can go it alone and sell directly to your fans through your own web presence but, for the moment, this is very rare. Why? There's no clear answer.

The gaming industry today feels like the music industry of the recent past. Bands were desperate to get signed to a label, and financial success was elusive without a record deal. Record labels provide the funding to record an album, the marketing to promote it, and access into the well-established distribution pipeline of record stores and other retail outlets. In the last five years, these gatekeepers have lost relevance as musicians like Jonathan Coulton, Radiohead, and Trent Reznor have started selling directly to their fans through their own sites, or adding them directly to iTunes or Amazon.

Small indies like Bit Blot (Aquaria), 2D Boy (World of Goo) and Invisible Handlebar's Audiosurf are like the Jonathan Coultons of gaming -- bootstrapping their game development, doing their own promotion, and cutting out every middleman to deliver games directly to their fans. And it seems to be working, at least well enough for them to grow and keep doing what they love.

Clearly, this route doesn't work for everyone. I talked to Jonatan Söderström of Cactus Soft, one of the most creative and prolific game designers working today. He releases an interesting freeware PC game nearly every month, but is struggling to survive at home in Sweden. In desperation and "on the brink of extinction," he recently added ads to his site and asked his audience for $1 donations so he could eat. Talking to him, he reminded me of many other brilliant programmers I've worked with -- motivated and talented, but almost pathologically uninterested (or incapable?) in self-promotion or business.

Bit Blot and 2D Boy both understand that while game design comes first, marketing can't be ignored. They work with the media, speak at conferences, keep visible blogs, and connect directly to their community online. For example, Bit Blot's "Seven Days of Aquaria" campaign offered new information and gameplay videos each day until its release. The result? So much anticipation and demand that their servers died on release day. It was a brilliant campaign that cost them nothing but their time.

As an outsider, it seems obvious that the costs (monetary and otherwise) of going down the publisher/platform route are too high. Like a record label, the publishers take a cut and try to own your intellectual property and distribution options. Developing for Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and Playstation Network all have their associated costs and royalties too. Between 30-50% of revenue goes to the platform and the development costs for localization and testing are much higher. Even if your overall sales are 20% lower by skipping the distribution channels, it seems like you'd still make just as much money, with the benefit of more control and more time to focus on actual game development. (If you're interested in the topic, Simon Carless wrote an interesting editorial earlier this month that ran some of the numbers.)

Whether you work in music, gaming or web development, the ultimate goal should be to do what you love without compromise, get recognized for your work, and not starve to death in the process. If your primary motivator is fame and getting your game in front of as many people as possible, regardless of the cost, it seems the only option for game developers is going to a major publisher and working with the big platforms. But if you're happy making a healthy living with a more modest audience, the DIY route is more viable every day.

I'm already overwhelmed at my first GDC, and from what I've heard, things don't even really get moving until tomorrow! The first two days are dominated by a number of excellent summits and tutorials, but apparently, the real action doesn't start until tomorrow when the game competitions, expo floor, major announcements, and big keynotes all begin in the morning.

I'm very interested in the parallels between gaming and web, and how the lines have blurred between game-like social software and social games. With that in mind, several people told me Worlds in Motion summit would be most relevant to my interests with sessions that "delve into online worlds, social gaming and media and player created activity, providing insight for developers of all backgrounds into how the game industry is collectively building socialization into games and integrating personalization and player-generated content into gameplay."

Instead, I've found the most inspiring and innovative talks have been in the Independent Games Summit. Unlike the companies in World in Motion, these tiny two-person startups and student projects are operating on a shoestring budget and exploring territory that the big guys aren't.

It seems like most of the interesting new projects are happening on the web or as PC/Mac downloads, partly because they don't have the funding or support to acquire dev kits for the consoles and partly because it gives them more control over their own fate. (For example, Xbox Live Arcade costs a minimum of $125,000 to create a game. The overhead for a Flash game, like starting a website, is mostly your own time.)

And because they have so many resource constraints, they're developing gameplay that's often experimental and completely unique. The IGF finalists are a laundry list of intriguing gameplay ideas (many of which I've mentioned on Waxy before):

• Audiosurf, a rhythm/racing/puzzle game that analyzes and visualizes your MP3 collection to create a dynamic 3D racetrack with characteristics pulled from tone, tempo, and volume.

• The Path, a horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood, with ambient music by Jarboe. If you follow the path before you, you lose the game.

• World of Goo, a construction game using physics to lift blobs to great heights

• Crayon Physics Deluxe, an adorable game that instantiates anything you sketch to solve puzzles.
  
  
• Poesysteme, breeding words with Darwinian evolution.

• Goo, like Go with liquid dynamics.

• Fret Nice, a platformer that uses the Guitar Hero guitar to control the character in time to the music

• Fez, the 2D character stuck in a 3D world

Several speakers have discussed how the art and design are more important than the technology, that games are more about conjuring emotion than showing off graphical effects. Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka described game development as a Zelda Triforce, with three parts of Art/Design, Business/Marketing, and Technology. Some games, like movie-licensed games, are led by business but have poor technology and design. Others, like many big-budget games, are led by technology. Indie games need to support their work with honest marketing and solid technology, but it's the creator's voice, vision, and passion that ultimately make the game resonate with an audience.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to playing and meeting this year's finalists tomorrow when the IGF Pavilion opens tomorrow.

Some notable quotes from the first couple of days of the show:

Gabe Zichermann on Facebook and eBay as MMOs: "I think we need to acknowledge there are things in life that are fun that game designers didn't make... People are engaged in playing all the time -- they're not fake worlds a game designer made... Everybody plays games all the time, whether we as game designers make them or not."

Raph Koster on virtual worlds: "We're building theme parks instead of parks."

Tracy Fullerton from USC Game Innovation Lab: "Indie's not about finding a backdoor into the industry or building games on a shoestring budget. It's about tearing down walls to create a new culture."

This week, thanks to Simon Carless at GameSetWatch, I'm going to the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco this week. I'll be writing about the conference daily and guest-publishing over at GSW.

If you're going, let me know. I'll be updating my current location on Twitter intermittently if you want to get together.

Also, if anyone out there works at Valve or can otherwise get me into the Valve party on Wednesday night, get in touch! You'll be my new best friend. Thank you, kind anonymous insider. I owe you cake.

It didn't take long for online sleuths to identify the man behind the shootings at Northern Illinois University yesterday. Early this morning, before the police or the Associated Press released his name, online sleuths identified the 27-year-old man as Stephen P. Kazmierczak. Online, he went by "Steve Kaz," "Kazmier," and "StatisticsGrad."

Working from there, a few blogs went to work at discovering his online accounts and other trails he's left online. Here's what we know so far, and I'll be updating this entry throughout the day as I find more.

Academic

As mentioned in several news articles, he was the vice-president of the school's Academic Criminal Justice Association. Their executive officers page lists one of his email addresses, skazmierczak@gmail.com. Searching for that email address shows some discussion list activity from 2004 related to his work, but nothing recent.

Here's his biography for his Vice-President position. (Via Steve Huff from True Crime Weblog.)

Steve served as an undergrad teaching aid for Sociology 388 (corrections) and 488 (juvenile delinquency) in spring, 2004. He has strong interests in justice reform and, as an older sociology/criminal justice major, he brings experience and ideas to the group.

My name is Steve Kazmierczak, and I'm a 3rd year student here at NIU. During my sophomore year I served as an aid for the SOCI170 web-board and last semester, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be a team leader for SOCI488-Juvenile Delinquency. Since attending NIU, I've worked very hard as a student, and I know that I would be able to forth the same effort as an officer of the ACA. I feel that I'm committed to social justice, and if elected as treasurer I promise to serve the NIU chapter of the ACA to the
best of my ability.

The following information was retrieved from the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign's student database before it was removed. (Found on Odd Culture.)

alias: skazmie2
name: Kazmierczak Steven Phillip
pretty_name: Steven Phillip Kazmierczak
email: skazmie2@express.cites.uiuc.edu
sudent_department_name: School of Social Work
student_program_name: MSW:Social Work -UIUC
student_level_description: Graduate - Urbana-Champaign
student_major_name: Social Work
phone: (815) 508-2416
office_address: 1207 W. Oregon, M/C 140, Urbana, IL 61801
title: ACADEMIC HOURLY
department: School of Social Work
type: person phone student staff

The NIU staff is removing pages where he was mentioned, but you can see in the Google cache that he won the 2006 Dean's Award and the Sociology Honors Society.

Here's a very short video of Stephen in class, taken by a professor in January 2004.

Personal

True Crime Weblog also discovered that he had problems with Paypal in this PaypalSucks thread from March 2007. He wrote, "Somebody please help me out, as I am desperate. I need this money to survive, as I am a poor graduate student just trying to make it by, which is why I started using Ebay in the first place, (to supplement the income I made through an assistantship)."

Testimonials

On a few sites, anonymous commenters that reportedly knew Kazmierczak have stepped forward to tell their stories. These are mostly anonymous, so it's impossible to verify their accuracy.

From Odd Culture, posted today:

I knew this kid, friend of a friend type deal. He was odd, quiet always gave me a creepy vibe, but then a lot of people give me that so I didn't think anything of it. Last I remember seeing him was in early jan. he showed me his tattoo's. They were all graphic an gory, but thats what guys like as tattoos. One was the doll from the Saw movies. I found that a little weird, why would a guy this age have a tattoo of some terrifying doll that signified nothing but a crazy serial killer. It scared me. But whatever floats your boat I thought. Then they started talking about his guns, he didn't bring it up, but just sat there and said a few things here and there jokingly, but quiet. I immediately thought why in the hell does this kid have a gun? He doesn't look like a hunter and didn't live anywhere I would consider dangerous enough for a gun, let alone two. The only thing I could think of is that he needed to prove something to himself or to someone else, since he was tall and gangly, and didn't look like he was mr popular. It's scary knowing that I hung out with that kid, that I sat there and discussed these things with him. He is one of those guys that you just know something is wrong with him the first time you meet him, but he's nice so you figure he is just a little odd. As for a motive goes, I do know that he had some issues with his sexuality, maybe it has something to do with that.

Also posted today on Odd Culture, by someone named "William":

I can't believe some of you, I grew up with Steve. I don't know what happened after we graduated high school to put him down this path but the kid I grew up with was a decent kid. I sat and ate lunch with him from grade school on up, we were in the same classes.

No matter how terrible his last acts I can't reconcile this with the adult I knew graduating high school, and the kid I grew up with.

In April 2006, Jim Schaffer posted a very long rant mentioning Kazmierczak on an Aphex Twin fan forum. Radar Online confirmed that Kazmierczak worked at the Elks Grove Pirates Cove children's theme park in 1995, so this one's definitely real.

steve motherfucking kazmierczak. yes thats exactly the problem here.

i was working at pirates cove in late 1995 and i was you know $4.50/hr child labor laws be damned and like i remember steve kazmierczak, the kind of kid who engaged in odd acts of fellatio with his dog, the kind of kid who'd go and masturbate in the bathroom while you were over at his house, the kind of person who injured kids on the train ride cuz he was mental and he shouldn't be given domain over kids on little faux-traincars with an aluminum baseball bat... when steve fucking kazmierczak ran up to me in late 95 early 96 proudly boasting his brand new copy of "i care because you do" like he was finally in with the cool kids.

both me and my friend joe died a little bit that day.

This morning, an anonymous commenter on The Copycat Effect wrote:

I attended just about every position with Steve at NIU. My senior year he was my Teachers Assistant for a quantitative research methods course. I would have never expected Steve to become involved in such a massive tragedy. He was always very nice, helpful, and a scholar. It is really a shame that he went and did something like this.

Updates

February 16: Some excellent digging by the commenters at True Crime Weblog revealed Kazmierczak's Photobucket account. Inside, there's a Get Well Soon card sent to "Jessica."

According to this Chicago Tribune article, "[Kazmierczak] moved to Champaign with his girlfriend, also a graduate of NIU's sociology program. The couple had both been officers in the school's student chapter of the American Corrections Association." The only other female member of the Academic Criminal Justice Association is Jessica Baty, the group's Secretary.

So, Jessica Baty is almost certainly Kazmierczak's girlfriend. The commenters also found this Myspace page belonging to Jessica, with an unpublished photo of the couple together. (I cached it, just in case.) Her profile is private, but currently has this status message: "Jessica is missing SK."

February 17: An anonymous commenter below discovered this weblog from someone who lived next door to Kazmierczak while he was growing up. This entry and this entry are both fascinating reading.

Looks like Digg found a copy of the Tetris valentine I've been hosting on my server since February 2006. The original was created by Mitch at the wonderful 4 Color Rebellion gaming blog, but when I tried to redirect the requests to their original entry, the traffic shut down their server in a few minutes.

So if you're looking for the valentine, here it is. Click it to see a full-size, print-quality version on 4 Color Rebellion's site, and see their other 2006 Geek Valentines.

And if you like those, don't miss 4 Color Rebellion's geek valentines for last year and this year! In 2007, they made adorable Phoenix Wright, Nintendo DS, Wii, and Metroid Prime valentines. This year, it's a set of valentines for Dr. Mario, Mario Galaxy, and Wii.

In case you're 14 years old, relatively new to the Internet, and/or coming from Digg, here are a bunch of other two-year-old links you might have missed: Halo Babies, Ze Frank's On Valentine's Day, A Very Star Wars Valentines, All Your Heart Candy Are Belong To Us, a set of vintage 1980s Valentines including Mario, Zelda, and TMNT, vector art of Ralph Wiggum's valentines, more original Nintendo valentines, and nothing woos a lady like romantic Perl poetry. Want something more fresh? New this year are the Team Fortress 2 valentines, Ironic Sans' Scientist Valentines, Jacks of Science's Science Valentines, Diesel Sweeties' E-Cards 2.0, a DIY pulsating LED heart card, interlocking Moebius strip hearts, and Woot's superhero comic anti-valentines.

Reading Rex Sorgatz's commemoration of Wired Magazine's first issue for its 15th birthday, I was reminded of the very first mentions of Wired online. Not on the web, which was only just getting started with the release of Mosaic 0.5 the month before, but on the uber-hip Northern California BBS, The WELL.

I love deep-diving the WELL archives for research. It's an amazing glimpse at the tech and media scene of the late '80s and early '90s, but especially for anyone interested in Wired. Many of Wired's founding staff and contributors were active on the WELL, and executive editor Kevin Kelly was a WELL co-founder, so it was natural that the BBS hosted the official Wired forum.

Below, for the first time on the public web, I've reprinted some of Wired's early history on the WELL, including the first call-for-feedback from May 1992 (9 months before the first issue), the first press release, and some of the more interesting responses.

As I mentioned yesterday, I got slightly obsessed with researching oscilloscope hacks yesterday, after seeing this jaw-dropping graphic demo released at Assembly 2007:

The author released the audio files (FLAC and WAV), allowing other people to try it on their own hardware or software scopes and post the results.

While researching oscilloscope art -- more on that tomorrow -- I stumbled on the MovieTone Digital Archive, an incredible and underrated online resource for vintage British newsreel footage from the 1930s to the late 1970s.

Amazingly, it seems virtually unknown on the web, linked seven times on Del.icio.us and only 33 links in Google's index. It's almost certainly because of the registration wall, with no clear insight into what's hiding behind the curtain. But once you register (for free), you get access to full access to the entire video archive in high-quality Quicktime or Windows Media.

Funny enough, I noticed that their Quicktime previews are viewable outside of their site. So, as long as it lasts, here's a small sampling of my favorites from the 48,500+ reels in the British MovieTone News archive.

Just received word moments ago that Consumating, the niche dating community acquired by CNET in December 2005, will be shutting down next month. In the wake of the sale of Webshots to American Greetings, it appears that CNET couldn't find a buyer for the site and is no longer interested in maintaining it.

Founders Ben Brown and Adam Mathes are no longer affiliated with Consumating, but they were the first to break the news two hours ago. "Just got word of the plan to turn off Consumating," Ben wrote on Twitter. Adam replied, "Beginning my long mourning period over the end of Consumating."

After Ben Brown left CNET in Spring 2007, Jesse Keyes took over managing the site. This morning, he posted a revealing Question of the Week on Consumating: "What will you do when it all comes grinding to a halt?" Jesse's own response was, "Pack it up and call it a day..."

Rumors of its demise have been swirling for the last two weeks, so most of the community didn't seem surprised in the active discussions. A week ago, Consumating users set up an off-site message board to ease the transition and keep friendships alive, in the event of a closure.

Though there hasn't been an official statement from CNET on the matter, sources close to the company confirmed that the shutdown date will be March 15. Users will be able to download a data dump of their questions, answers, and other social activity as a comma-separated file.

Even though Consumating never found a huge audience or revenue, it's worth noting that it still has a dedicated following that loves the site, uses it every day, and formed offline relationships because of it. It's unfortunate that CNET couldn't find a way to keep the site online, even if that meant handing it back to the users that made it special. Since online communities are built on top of user's contributions and social interactions, it raises the question: are companies responsible for keeping community website alive, even after they cease to be strategically desirable?

Well, maybe the Consumating founders did find a way to preserve it after shutdown. Shortly before Ben Brown left, he pushed CNET to open source the Consumating code base. That project, Clonesumating, is available on Google Code. After it's burned to the ground, maybe an open version of Consumating will rise from the ashes.

February 14 Update: Yesterday, Jesse Keyes gave the official announcement. "We know you want and deserve a site that is vibrant and fresh, and we don't think it's fair to you to keep an unsupported site live. And so, we'll be shutting Consumating.com down on March 15th," he wrote. "In a couple weeks we'll have a way available for you to download a file with most of your profile data, which could theoretically be imported into a similar site. Details will come when we're ready to release the exporter."

According to this thread, the private messaging feature recently stopped working and nobody's around to fix it. How depressing.

I'm working on redesigning Waxy today, so no huge article. Instead, a roundup of brand new updates to posts from my first week of full-time blogging.

Colin's Bear Animation

Colin emailed to let me know that his inadequate former professor no longer works at the school. "They've hired a new professor this semester and he actually works at Alias," he wrote. "In only two weeks it has become very clear that we now have someone worth our parents' hard-earned cash."

Also, by request, I found a full-length copy of the song from the video. Here's an MP3 of Funky Monkey Dance from the Mother 3 soundtrack. (The good part starts at 1:20.)

Personal Ads of the Digerati

Surprisingly, the only people that seemed to care about Dave's personal ad were Valleywag, Eye on Winer (the newest in a long line of obsessive Dave Winer watchdog sites), and Dave Winer himself. He commented on it a few times on his Twitter account, but that was about it. (Related, Eye on Winer posted this Knight-Ridder article from 1986 about American bachelors, with Dave Winer in the lead story.)

Many more people took note of the bit about Richard Stallman's extremely unusual web browsing habits, culled from this post I dug up from a discussion list late last year. That link ended up on Zawodny's blog and, later, the top of Reddit. I emailed RMS some questions, to ask him more about this, leading to the shortest interview ever:

I'm fascinated with a message I read about how you read the web with a wget demon. Could you elaborate on it?

It is a program that runs wget and mails me back the result.

Do you then convert the HTML to plain text and read it by email, or do you load the retrieved file in a browser? (If so, which browser?)

I can do either one.

Finally, is it free software, or something that you'd be willing to release?

I did not write it, but our sysadmins say it is kludgy.

Thanks for that elaborate explanation, Richard! As Philipp told me, "He answers like a programmer. If you stopped him on the street to ask, 'Do you know the time?' he'd say 'Yes' and leave."

The Times (UK) Spamming Social Sites

As I noted last week, The Times and Sitelynx both absolved themselves of responsibility. The Times claimed they weren't aware that social media spamming was going on, which I tend to believe, and Sitelynx blamed Piotr completely for promoting articles on social sites -- not because that's a practice Sitelynx opposes, but because he wasn't "properly trained" to do it and that's not what he wasn't hired to do. He was removed from The Times account.

Another Sitelynx employee, Sibylle Bernardakis, modified her StumbleUpon profile the day after the story broke to disclose her affiliation with The Sun, another Sitelynx client. I asked Graham Hansell, founder of Sitelynx, about this last week:

Graham responded, "She has followed our policy for submissions -- Disclaimers where possible, latest news only, direct linking (no redirect) to valuable content, no hidden links or promotional content." I pointed out that it appeared Sibylle never disclosed her affiliations before she modified her profiles earlier today. Graham replied, "That I am not aware of and will investigate. I don't believe that to be true and we are obviously reviewing our internal policy for greater transparency."

Some commenters noted that Chris Deary and Ilana Fox at The Sun also use Delicious extensively for promoting their articles. This doesn't seem problematic because their affiliation with The Sun is transparent and disclosed, while Piotr and Sybille were not.

Brent Spiner's Ol' Yellow Eyes is Back

I just found out that a couple days before my post, Brent Spiner launched his new personal site and released a video on YouTube about his long-awaited concept album, Dreamland. Inspired by Broadway musicals and old-fashioned radio shows, the album is available for pre-order on Brent's site. Did I mention it features the voice acting of Mark Hamill?

By request of Waxy reader Logan Ingalls, I spent most of the day tracking down the origins of the Plane On A Treadmill physics puzzle/meme. I figured this would be simple, but six hours later, I've combed through archives of the web, Usenet, magazines, academic journal, physics websites, and hundreds of discussion forums looking for the source.

There have been a couple thought experiments that came close, but still different enough that they can't be considered the source. Jason Scott found this Usenet post from September 1990, which sounded promising:

There is nothing special about the ground as a reference plane! Consider a large flatbed truck moving at 80 mph from east to west. Does the truck's velocity have ANY effect on the airplane's ability to fly? Now try to land on the truck....the velocity of the truck becomes *real* important!

O.K., I'll carry my reductio-ad-absurdum one step more. I mount the entire state of california on a conveyor belt. Initially my conveyor belt is at rest. I take off, climb to some high altitude, and then key my mike 4 times which sets the ground into motion. Does my plane suddenly stop flying?

Very similar, but key differences in the question (and a five-year-gap before it caught on) suggest that this didn't inspire the puzzle.

So, where did it come from? The earliest reference to it that I can find is this post to the PhysOrg Forums, dated July 19, 2005. It seems unlikely that some random poster on a physics message board would have invented it, but as far as I can tell, this is the case. Update: Its appearance online goes back to a Russian discussion forum in 2003. Read the updates at the bottom of the post for more.

I've tried to contact "dirak" through the PhysOrg site to get a decisive answer, but since he hasn't posted a new message since July 2006, I think I'm out of luck. Looking for his username turns up some Slashdot submissions, all anonymous, and that's about it. I'd even tried to contact the PhysOrg forum creators, but they're extremely protective about their own privacy, too. As a desperate measure to locate the PhysOrg folks, I then tried to track down the freelance writers that wrote for PhysOrg (through Myspace and Facebook), and am waiting for those leads to respond. Update: Dirak responded! Read the updates below.

There's no reference to the puzzle anywhere before July 2005, and no reference to it again until October 2005, suggesting that the rapidly-expanding PhysOrg thread led to users cross-posting it to other forums to get advice.

One of the earliest references is from November 15, 2005 on this discussion thread from Flightinfo.com, a popular aviation forum for serious pilots. Often cited in other messages from 2005, the Flightinfo thread was eventually removed from the site entirely in late 2006. On November 27, it spread further when an AVWeb columnist wrote a long article (also now offline) about how the controversy was spreading in the pilot community.

At this point, it was appearing on several message boards, inspiring heated debate everywhere it went. In December 2005, the question was posed to the Straight Dope discussion forum with no clear answers. A few weeks later, Cecil Adams himself addressed the question in his February 3, 2006 column. Cecil's syndicated column broke the question into the mainstream. A few days later, Jason Kottke started his obsession with the question and the rest is history. Mythbusters' elaborate tests were intended to answer the question for good, but it seems to have only strengthened the resolve of its detractors.

So until I hear back from "dirak," or manage to contact PhysOrg, I'm going to consider this case closed. (Needless to say, if you can find an earlier reference or have any other information, please let me know.)

Updated February 7: Unbelievably, "Dirak" (his real name's Andrew) responded to my private message through the PhysOrg forums! He says, "Yes, I'm sure I was the first who brought this topic to the English-speaking internet. However, I wasn't the one who invented this question. I'm half-Russian and I read about it on one of Russian forums back in 2005."

He continues, "I looked for that thread for you, here it is (it's in Russian). The first guy (shipwreck) wrote about it in 2003 and in his first post he says that they were arguing about it in his college. shipwreck is an unregistered user on that board, so I'm not sure if it's possible to contact him at all. Hope this helps you."

Incredible. So, this brings its appearance online back to August 4, 2003. Any Russians out there want to carry on the search? Trying to contact "Shipwreck" would be the next step.

Also: Want me to research another meme? Email or IM me and I'll give it a shot. Whee!

Yesterday, I released six years of piracy data for your bemusement and data munging. But what does it all mean? Well, let's start with a couple questions.

1. Is the MPAA doing a better job at preventing screeners from leaking online?

It's hard to say. There are a couple weeks left, but so far, less than half of the 32 Academy screeners have leaked online. But yet, all but four three of the 34 nominated films are available in DVD quality right now, either as a screener or retail DVD. (Lars and the Real Girl, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and The Savages are the only films that haven't leaked online in any form.)

If you look at the chart, it doesn't seem like much has changed in the time it takes for films to leak online.

So what's really going on here?

2. Is the MPAA preventing overall piracy of Oscar films?

No. 148 out of 151 of Oscar-nominated films from 2003 to 2007 were available in DVD quality (either leaked retail or screener DVDs) by Oscar night. The films are getting leaked just as quickly as ever, but apparently not through Academy screeners. This could be because watermarks and recent court cases are acting as an effective deterrent, but I think it's attributable to two other reasons, which I mentioned in my post yesterday.

First, the gap between theatrical releases to retail DVD is getting shorter. (Note: I'm going to use the date the retail DVD was leaked as an approximation of the official DVD release date.) In the last five years, it's gone from an average of about four months to about three months, and continuing to shrink.

Second, the rise of Region 5 DVD transfers from overseas. These DVDs transferred directly from the film source were intended to help them compete with pirates by providing high-quality retail copies of films at the time of the film's release. Instead, it's created a huge new method of acquiring films before screeners are even released. (Read more about R5s at Afterdawn.)

Screeners aren't leaking as often, not because the MPAA's protecting them better, but because they've made the whole process moot by providing higher-quality, easier-to-acquire copies before screeners are released, in the form of R5 and retail DVDs.

Find anything else interesting in the data? Please, comment or send it to me and I'll add it to this entry.

February 11 Update: The Lars and the Real Girl screener was released. I updated the data.

Every year, the Academy tries to stop Oscar films from leaking online. And every year, they leak all the same. I've been tracking Oscar piracy since 2004, but I've decided to up the ante, releasing all the underlying data and extending it to 2003. Six years of Oscar piracy data on all 186 nominated films from 2003 to 2008 -- including US release dates for Academy screeners, cams, telesyncs, R5/telecines, screener leaks and retail DVD rips -- can all be viewed or downloaded below.

View: Google Spreadsheets
Download: Excel (with formulas)
Download: CSV

This year, all but six of the 34 nominated films were available in DVD quality by the last week of January. This is about consistent with past years, but we're seeing a shift towards studios releasing DVDs closer to their theatrical date. This trend, combined with the new availability of high-quality Region 5 rips from overseas, is making the screener leak less meaningful. After all, why bother releasing the screener if the retail DVD or a direct-from-film transfer is already out?

Collecting this data took me all day, so I'm going to publish my analysis and pretty charts tomorrow. Update: Here's Part 2, with my analysis and charts.

This was my first week of daily blogging, so I thought I'd spend a moment to explain what I'm doing and why.

Very few weblogs do any kind of original research on a daily basis. Most either spend their time repurposing (or just linking to) original research from mainstream media or other sources, or they do commentary and analysis. Their most important role is as information filters, distilling everything going on in the world relevant to their audience and presenting only the good stuff. Finding a great filter is insanely valuable, but at the end of the day, does Waxy Links add anything new to the conversation?

So I'm going to try an experiment this year: publish something original on Waxy.org, every weekday. Not my opinions about news (opinions are cheap) and not just glorified linkblogging, but something new: original research, investigative journalism, information visualization, digitizing dead media, live reporting, or interviews. I'll also be releasing new applications, interactive web toys, and social software throughout the year, because as much as I love journalism, I love coding just as much.

I don't know exactly what I'll do yet, and I don't have many expectations. I also don't expect it'll drive a huge amount of traffic (or money), but I'm pretty sure it'll be more fun than the alternatives.

This week, I wrote five stories. On Monday, I tracked a silly meme to its source and interviewed the creator, revealing some information that's never been mentioned online before. Tuesday, I debunked one net legend's personal ad with solid (and bizarre) evidence that I searched for, and published another that's never been seen on the web. Wednesday, I exposed a deceptive campaign to lift a respected newspaper's search engine rankings using social media websites. Thursday, I updated the developing story by interviewing representatives from the newspaper and its consulting firm, and interviewed several community founders about their policies regarding the practice. And today, I posted the MP3s of a rare, geeky album to the web for the first time.

So, a mix of hard and (extremely) soft news. But each story, I hope, added something completely new to the web that wasn't there before.

That's it. I hope you stick around. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

I was writing a long, interesting article about the Microsoft and Yahoo! merger, with several interviews from insiders at both companies, but I'm already sick to death of hearing about it. So I quit! Instead, here's Brent "Data" Spiner's rare 1991 album, "Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back."

Don't miss "It's a Sin (To Tell A Lie)," with background vocals by The Sunspots -- Jonathan "Riker" Frakes, Michael "Worf" Dorn, LeVar "Reading Rainbow" Burton, and Patrick "I've Seen Everything" Stewart.

Brent Spiner - Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back (1991)

1. Time After Time
2. The Very Thought of You
3. More Than You Know
4. Toot Toot Tootsie
5. Embraceable You
6. It's a Sin (To Tell a Lie)
7. Long, Long Time
8. Carolina in the Morning
9. Marie (Randy Newman cover)
10. Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart
11. When I Fall in Love
12. Goodnight, Sweetheart

This album is extremely rare, and I believe this is the first time the MP3s have ever been publicly available on the Web. (I don't even see it on the torrent trackers.) The cheapest copy of the CD on Amazon is $89.99, but you can generally find it on eBay in the $40-50 range. Since the album's out of print, I hope Brent won't mind that I'm releasing it here.

February 7 Update: Less than a week ago, a couple days before this post, Brent Spiner launched his new personal site and released a video on YouTube about his long-awaited concept album, Dreamland. Inspired by Broadway musicals and old-fashioned radio shows, the album is available for pre-order on Brent's site. Did I mention it features the voice acting of Mark Hamill?