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Dad

Posted February 5, 2019February 5, 2019 by Andy Baio

My father passed away on January 24, less than two weeks ago, while my family was still reeling from the news that he had developed Stage IV lymphoma.

I’ve never talked about my dad here before, mostly because I don’t write often about my personal life, but I’ve made exceptions in the past to commemorate and honor the deaths of people who meant a lot to me.

On Saturday, we gathered together at the Catholic church in Burbank where my parents were married and my grandfather’s funeral was held, and we said goodbye to my dad, Stephen Baio.

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it.


There are three words I keep hearing over and over again since my dad passed away, when I’m talking to people who knew him — some I know well, some who haven’t seen me since I was a little kid, and some of you that I’d never met before.

Those three words are, “Everyone loved Steve.”

It’s true, everyone loved Steve. To know my dad was to love him.

Stephen Baio was impossible not to like. He lit up a room with a joyful and contagious enthusiasm — sweet and sincere, and genuinely funny. He was unabashedly silly. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.

He was generous to everyone he met, whether it was someone he knew for 30 minutes or 30 years. To me, it always felt like he had a hard time saving money because of how much he loved spending it on others.

My dad made people happy, and as long as you’re making yourself and other people happy and you’re not hurting anybody, who cares what anybody else thinks? You’re probably doing the right thing.

My dad taught me the importance of being yourself. Being true to who you are. He taught me the values of loyalty, friendship, and kindness.

And these weren’t lessons that could be spoken: he taught me by how he lived his life, it was central to how he walked through the world, and how over time, you change it by who you touch along the way, in ways big and small.


After he passed away, I went into his bedroom to find some photos for this memorial service.

And in one big box, I found photos from his entire life. Photos from his childhood with his mother, Teresa, and with his brother, Anthony, and his late sister, Nicolina, my Aunt Nicki.

I found photos with old friends in the ‘70s, camping in the mountains and just goofing around. Photos from his prom, from parties, from his wedding and with my mom. So many from my childhood, going to Disneyland and the beach, dressing up for Halloweens, Christmases, and Easters long ago. Photos from the tours he went on, traveling with bands or shooting photos of monuments in Tokyo. And later, photos from my own wedding, photos with his grandson.

But after that, I found three more big boxes of the same size, and I was surprised to see them stuffed full of every greeting card, postcard, letter, and memento he ever received. Clippings from newspapers, birth announcements and obituaries, matchbook covers and cassette recordings of long-forgotten conversations. Piles of memories spanning decades, immaculately organized into dozens of manila envelopes, filled to bursting.

It was such a clear reminder how much every one of your friendships and relationships meant to him.

Everyone loved Steve, and you should know without any question or doubt, that he loved you all back.


Seven years ago, my Dad wrote a long handwritten letter, one of thousands he’d written in his life. But this one was special, it was only meant to be read in the event of his passing.

I read it for the first time the day after he died, and I’d like to read from it now.

To Whom It May Concern,

I guess this would be considered my last Will and Testament.

Anyways, whatever it is, these are my wishes, for things to be done whenever I’m gone.

I’m hoping there’s not a lot of things to ask for, I don’t want to be too much of a pain in the ass.

So here goes, I’m writing these things down as I’m writing and thinking.

He goes on to talk about how he wanted his personal belongings distributed or donated. He talks about how he wanted to be cremated, and how he wanted his ashes scattered in the High Sierras, up by Olancha, Mammoth, and June Lakes, places that he loved so much.

He said that he didn’t want an expensive funeral, just a memorial with all of his friends and family through the years — all of you — to come together and have what he called “a nice party.”

He wrote, “I want all the people who meant a lot to me to be there. I’m sure you’ll have a good time.”

I’m going to give my dad the last word, by reading from the end of his will, a message that he addressed directly to all of you — the people who meant so much to him in his life. Here’s what he wrote:

Well, I think that’s about it for now. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know. (Ha Ha.)

I’ll sure miss you a lot, more than you’ll ever know.

Maybe I’ll see you where ever God decides to send me. I hope there’ll be fishing and pretty girls, good music, my Mom’s Italian spaghetti, and beer.

Thank you all for everything, your love, your friendship, good fun, good laughs and memories, and for the pleasure just to know each and every one of you.

With all my love, now and forever.

Bye for now,

Me
Stephen

Thank you.

3 Comments

Suck.com, Gone for Good (For Good)

Posted January 11, 2019January 11, 2019 by Andy Baio

13 years ago, I wrote a post here called “Suck.com, Gone for Good” when the seminal webzine appeared to go offline in December 2005, redirected to a porn search portal.

Fans quickly rallied around it, with some scrambling to put up mirrors and archives, including Suck contributor Greg Knauss and the dearly-missed Aaron Swartz. A few days later, Lycos apparently changed their mind and pointed the domain back to its original server, where it managed to stay for 13 more years.

The site’s had near-death experiences in the past, including some downtime in 2015, but it’s somehow managed to stay online at its original domain for 23 years — more than 17 years after its last column on June 8, 2001.

Three weeks ago, on December 16, 2018, the ownership changed hands from Lycos to a private GoDaddy account. Shortly after that, the Suck.com domain started redirecting to this Weebly account with an “under construction” message.

Yesterday, I noticed the content changed, now displaying a series of sports-related polls, and the following greeting:

Welcome to Suck.com. All sports, all the time. Let your voice be heard! You tell us, does it suck or not?

I reached out to the new owners, but no response yet.

Assuming the domain was sold legitimately by Lycos, this permanently spells the end of Suck.com.

For retrospectives on Suck’s role in early web history, these links do a good job:

  • Josh Quittner’s 1996 Wired article about the site’s origins.
  • Keep Going’s “The Big Fish,” a 2005 retrospective about the impact of “the first great website”
  • Engadget’s Nicole Lee interviewed the Suck crew after their appearance at XOXO 2015.
  • The Internet History Podcast with Suck founders Carl Steadman and Joey Anuff, and the followup episode.
  • In 2016, The Atlantic’s Anna Wiener wrote about “the best magazine on the early web.”
  • In 2017, The History of the Web covered “The Web After Suck” in its second post.

If you’re feeling nostalgic, Suck, Again is an ongoing newsletter by Mark Macdonald that emails each column to you, 20 years to the day.

Sadly, every existing link to Suck’s articles and features are now broken, but of course, available in the Wayback Machine.

If you want to keep it alive for a while longer, add the line below to your hosts file and Suck.com links will still work for as long as Lycos keeps the server online.

209.202.254.90 suck.com

Or use Greg Knauss’s proxy, which is live once again at suck.eod.com.

Thanks to Carl Steadman, Joey Anuff, Heather Havrilesky, Tim Cavanaugh, Ana Marie Cox, Terry Colon, Owen Thomas, and every other Suckster for making something special we’re still talking about all these years later.

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Morph Cut Transitions on TV News

Posted December 13, 2018December 13, 2018 by Andy Baio

Yesterday, this clip from BBC News popped up on Twitter, in which a small child appears to materialize in the background of a woman-on-the-street interview.

WTF… does anyone else see the child teleport? pic.twitter.com/P0ju9J9cby

— @realTewkesburyBC (@TewkesburyLeak) December 12, 2018

If you watch the woman’s face at the same time the boy appears, you can see her expression morph into a smile.

This technique is known as a Morph Cut, a feature added to Adobe Premiere Pro in 2015, intended to smooth transitions in interview footage, removing unwanted pauses, stutters, and filler words (“like,” “um,” and “uh”) without hard splices and cuts.

The results, when used appropriately in interview footage without a changing background, can be nearly seamless.

It’s likely that BBC News used a morph cut in the clip above to tighten up the interview without changing its meaning. But it’s also ripe for abuse and fully capable of altering the meaning of an interview, and in many cases, undetectable.

I’ve known radio interviews were edited like this for years, but the BBC News clip is the first time I’ve seen the technique used in a video interview… or is it?

How many times have you watched footage that was subtly modified using off-the-shelf software, and never knew? Would you ever notice? Would you care?

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The “Arcade” Workprint, ’90s Cyber-Cinema Without Music or Sound Effects

Posted December 13, 2018December 13, 2018 by Andy Baio

As a connoisseur of crappy movies about technology, I’m a fan of Arcade, the 1993 B-movie where a bunch of kids get trapped inside a Lawnmower Man-esque virtual reality game by a rogue AI.

It’s very ’90s, with a cast including Seth Green, A.J. Langer from My So-Called Life, John de Lancie (aka “Q” from Star Trek: The Next Generation), and the kid who played “Ralphie” in A Christmas Story. It was written by the same screenwriter as Dark City and The Dark Knight trilogy, but you’d never know it.

This far-too-long trailer tells you everything you need to know.

Last March, AV Club wrote about the film.

Arcade’s vision of tomorrow is all black bodysuits and skateboards, spinning gyroscopes and gleaming silver skulls, as though it sprung to life from the bored margin doodles of some eight-grader’s math book. That aesthetic, combined with its tinny synth score and panicky PSAs about the corrupting influence of video games, lends Arcade a hint of techno-culture commentary, and thus it arguably holds the same appeal as that whole vaporwave craze that briefly fascinated the internet.

I’ve seen Arcade before, but what I haven’t seen is this bizarre copy I just stumbled across on YouTube, uploaded by an Italian movie distributor. (Their channel is a goldmine of obscure film.)

It was clearly unauthorized for distribution, with “Not for Commercial Use” and a large blurred watermark throughout.

But most notably, it’s missing all music and sound effects, with only the dialogue. This must be some sort of workprint or pre-release screener, never intended to be seen before, but I’m so glad it exists.

Without a score or sound effects, every scene becomes pure cringe, bordering on the surreal, like those Silent Music Video remixes. Dubbed-in dialogue becomes incredibly obvious without other ambient audio in the mix, and awkward silences are everywhere.

The best/worst scenes in this version are with the evil AI, a character creatively named “Arcade,” in the game also named “Arcade.” Here are three example scenes.

It’s strange seeing a version of a movie that was never meant to be seen, and I can safely say I’ve never seen anything like it. The entire workprint is here — enjoy it if you can. (Content Warning: The film has subplots involving child abuse and a parent’s suicide.)

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The Incredibly Unlikely Creation of Katamari Damacy

Posted December 11, 2018December 13, 2018 by Andy Baio

In October, Boss Fight Books published the latest in their eponymous series of books dedicated to video games, this one covering the creation and impact of Katamari Damacy.

The author, L. E. Hall, is a friend and local game designer, the creator of Portland’s first escape room and recently opened The Wandmaker’s House, an immersive photo and game pop-up that I loved. I was lucky enough to follow the development of the book from its announcement in 2016, to its printing and publishing in October.

I first heard about Katamari in February 2004 before its release in Japan, and was mega-hyped to seek it out at E3 in 2004, four months before its U.S. release. When I saw that lone cabinet tucked into the back of Namco’s booth, I fell in love instantly and named it Best of Show.

But having finished the book, it’s remarkable that Katamari got made at all.

Namco was creator Keita Takahashi’s first job in the game industry, and he very nearly wasn’t hired. In Hall’s book, Takahashi talked about how he was openly critical of Namco’s existing games, and said so during the interview process. The artists loved him, but the executives weren’t convinced.

“Actually, I found out the funny truth after I joined Namco, from an HR guy who I got along with,” Takahashi said. “I failed the last job interview for sure. Sounds like some executives didn’t like me. But one of the interviewers from the artist interview persuaded an executive who was his boss to hire me. So I asked him, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘You looked very unique, and I felt there was potential to make something fun with you.’”

When he came up with the concept for Katamari, his boss was on board, but there was no clear path for the art departmenrt to pitch games.

“I talked with [Mitsutoshi] Ozaki-san, my boss, about how we should move this idea forward to an actual internal production,” Takahashi said. “Usually game ideas were proposed from the game design department at Namco, but we both worked in the art department. Also, technically Ozaki-san was not my actual boss at that time. He had moved to another department, so I had to talk to my current boss about my idea first—but he was not a manager of game designers, he was a manager of artists. He seemed to not have a bad impression of my idea, but he couldn’t make a decision about the game itself.”

The game ended up getting made through Namco Digital Hollywood Game Lab, a “six-month course designed to help developers learn skills necessary for creating games for the PlayStation 2.”

Each successive prototype built excitement internally, but Takahashi had to continually fight for his singular vision, finally securing a budget to make the game.

Even after its Japanese release, Namco wasn’t planning an English translation or American release until Takahashi was asked to appear at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC 2003.

Hall writes:

Darius Kazemi was in that audience that day. He wrote that “the feeling in that room when Keita showed Katamari was just electric. It was amazing to see all these game developers, literally the best of the best in the world, in complete awe of this weird little game. At the end of the presentation, when he said there were no plans to port it to the US market, everyone was just devastated.” As Takahashi and the fans would soon learn, the excitement generated by that presentation was enough to move mountains.

The buzz from that appearance led to Namco bringing Katamari and its creator to E3 in 2004, where I played it for the first time. I bought it on its U.S. release day on September 22, 2004, and like so many other people, was delighted by a game that’s truly unique.

Through interviews and original research, Hall’s book explores the creation of the game and how its concept, visual design, gameplay, characters, and cult soundtrack all evolved. I particularly loved the sections on how Portland-based software developer Panic came to be the exclusive producer of Katamari merchandise, and the cultural context behind the King of All Cosmos’ transgression of traditionally masculine gender roles.

If you’re a fan of the original Katamari Damacy, this is a very good month for you. In addition to Hall’s book — which I wholeheartedly recommend buying direct or through Powell’s or Amazon — the original game was just re-released as Katamari Damacy REROLL for the Switch and PC, remastered in HD for the first time.

And while Panic’s no longer selling shirts, there’s a bunch of new Katamari merchandise newly available through Fangamer, including this double LP of the soundtrack on vinyl.

Keep rolling, little prince!

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