Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

The Parties I Missed and the Parties I Didn't
It's hard not to browse over the attendee list for Foo Camp and not feel sad that I couldn't dip in and out of crowds of those folks. Some of them I heavily disagree with, some of them I worship from afar, but there's no question that a goulash of them in a non-commercialized space is likely a wonder to behold. What great ideas might be reverberating from that event as we speak!

It reminds me a lot of another great party I wasn't invited to, the Apple II Reunion hosted by John Romero in October of 1998. Information about this party is mostly buried away, but the attendees included Chuckles, The Fat Man, Lord British, Jordan Mechner, Bill Budge, Dan Gorlin, and The Woz. Just knowing these folks got to spend an evening together makes me happy indeed, on principle.

These sorts of events happen a lot, actually, depending on who you look up to and what floats your nostalgic/cutting-edge boat. For example, anyone who has ever lost a weekend with an Atari Joystick or hit their head against a particularly difficult puzzle in an adventure game would likely be in heaven at the Classic Gaming Expo. The Vintage Computer Festivals bring along their share of luminaries and infamy, as do the myriad hacker conventions that pepper the landscape. I'll leave the debate about the purpose and concept behind "hacker conventions" for some other time, but I can say that I happen to enjoy attending (and speaking at) them very much. Here's a hint: treat them like parties instead of paradigm-changing resume-boosters.

What really confuses me is the perception that people who own computers or at least delve into them intensively eschew parties, meetings or other social gatherings for the percieved safety and distance of online. Even the most extreme cases want a place where they belong and where they can ask things rapid-fire of a group of others like themselves, so any announced gathering interests them. And those extreme cases are just that: extreme. You can't discount the importance of reality to the inhabitants of the online world, and shoving people into some sort of freak box does nobody a favor, including yourself.

Having an event be invitation-only and then not getting invited is always a downer. It's probably not you; it's just that invitations depend by nature on the right webs of knowledge and trust, and if you're not in the one that drives the event, then you're not getting in no matter how much you might deserve to. The solution is simple: Build your own massive web of trust, and then wait for the cross-links to make your world a richer place.

I was lucky enough to get over to NAID (North American International Demoparty) in 1996, but missed Pilgrimage in 2003. Demoparties, those insane gatherings of computer people and what-have-you over a weekend are rather rare in the United States, mostly owing to insurance concerns. They're not invitation-only, but that's not important; the goal is that anyone with some talent, knowledge or ability throws their hat into the ring, maybe they compete at something, and otherwise make a name for themselves. I am hoping that with BBS Documentary DVDs in hand and knapsack, I will make my way across a bunch of them in the coming year or two and meet a lot of people and see a lot of wonderous things.

Many times, when you're at an event, you don't really feel like it's anything special other than a good time (or a not so good time). It's only with the addition of years that you start to look back and get that perspective to realize that the folks who were starting out at those get-togethers have gone on to great things. You never know where the next mad geniuses and media-gravitating superstars will come from; that's the magic of it. Maybe you'll be with friends or your children years from now, mentioning you sat at a bar next to the guy who made the next big thing. In other words, don't despair at your position on the arbitrary totem pole of now; if you truly care about such things (knowing you're friends with the best and brightest, as opposed to the most visible) then energy expended meeting people and communicating with them will come back ten-fold.

People, after all, are what make the whole thing memorable. Machines are machines, but it's the people who turn a LAN into a LAN Party.

Discuss

posted by Jason Scott at 9:28:48 PM | permalink

All Hail Gunderloy
BoingBoing, as a print magazine, was a part of a universe of small-press publications, hatched in apartments and off-hours and tons of sneaking around being able to afford the next issue. There were lots of names for this sort of creation, but the closest is "the zine movement", which essentially came into a golden period when the cost of printing or at least photocopying dropped to affordable levels. With this came a massive influx of leaflets, booklets, rants, and other such creations on actual, from-an-unsuspecting-tree paper.

This may sound like it's not all that related to computer history, but in many ways it is, because the same type of fertile minds that seized the (to them) obvious opportunity of zines did the same with websites, and many of those creative forces blast across the Internet in the present day, using the same excitement and skills they had to make the web a very interesting place indeed.

There were so many figures I remember from that part of my life, the people whose creations I sent money or stamps or my own art to get a copy of, most of which I still have, packed away in actual space here in my home just like I keep so much online history packed on my hard drives. There were so many of them....

And then there was Gunderloy.

Gunderloy is my often-forgotten creative mentor, one forgotten by me because his star shone so brightly and so intensively and then disappeared. My memories of him and others are casualties of my aging and moving on; sometimes I forget how many people contributed to what I am, and it's efforts like my web projects that help me to bring them back.

Most people who know anything of Mike Gunderloy know his creation even better: Factsheet Five held for a number of years the uncontested crown in keeping track of "small-press" publications, and by small press I mean a guy stealing time on the office copier. This isn't to say Mike didn't take non-independent materials; it just worked out that among the hundreds of individual creations and writings that Mike reviewed, it wasn't the latest bestseller or even the accepted "alternative" book that was sold in the same chain stores as the "mainstream" ones. This was the stuff in the pile next to the magazine section in your small record store, the stuff with the black and white cover with the hand-drawn date and issue number, the one where you opened it up and you could just tell, looking at the lettering, that they didn't use QuarkXpress or Print Shop, they used some tape and glue and hoped it would all hold together down at the library when they ran it through for 20 copies.

Factsheet Five produced an issue about once every two months, the central repository of reviews about zines, records, and other creations firing out of homes and apartments all over the country. Throughout the issue were neat little cartoons, tons of writing, and about every crank advertisement for every bizarro publication and project you might want to find. I even remember the many ads from Boing-Boing, featuring a little character I thought of as "The Ornament Girl" (Sorry, couldn't find an image of her online).

I discovered Factsheet Five during my first days of college in Boston. It was on the magazine shelf at Tower Records of all places, with a cover by Gaither, which caught my eye immediately. It was issue #27, so I was definitely a late-comer to the party. What struck me was how many zines were listed, all of them having come out in just the last couple of months, and only later, after many bathroom and subway reads, did I come to realize that most of these reviews, these quick little paragraphs summarizing the content of these hundreds of zines, were written by one person.

If nothing else comes out of your reading this entry, let it be this: for years, a 100-200 page magazine showed up six times a year featuring hundreds of thoughtful reviews written by a single individual. He had to do 90 hour weeks to do it, and he crashed against the rocks when it ultimately caught up to his life, but he did it. And if someone can accomplish such a thing, you can accomplish anything. The pure herculean aspects of this astounds me, even now; he had to get a zine, indicate what type of printing was used to make it, say how many pages there were, list the subscription information, read it through, and then create a review. And then do it again. Hundreds of times. To produce one issue. And then he'd put that issue to bed and start on the next one.

Now, I rush to clarify that Mike wasn't the sole individual involved with the magazine and its sole staff member. Many dozens of people assisted, wrote columns, helped get Factsheet Five out, contributed artwork, and wrote many, many reviews themselves. But it can't be discounted how central to the whole experience and endeavor Mike was, and how, even glancing through the pages of these issues today (I kept them; they're all treasures) you see how he stands out from nearly every page, a strong influence and voice that doesn't crush the personality of the people he works with or whose work he reviews, ending the paragraph with a little (MG) to let you know who had read it. There's so much to learn from him in these pages. They age wonderfully; and they still inspire.

I only actually met Mike on two occasions. Once during a party held in his home, and the other in New York City, when he spoke at a small political meeting. Both are memorable for entirely different reasons.

I went to the New York City meeting simply because Mike mentioned in Factsheet Five that he would speak there. I had no interest in the politics or anything else. I was happy to be there, although at the time I had a very terrifying phobia of NYC and it says how much I wanted to see him in person, because the entire experience was like someone afraid of heights getting dinner in a revolving restaurant. I bought up some issues of Factsheet Five, got Mike to autograph them, acquired some weird pamphlets and stickers, and quickly ran home to the suburbs, thinking I'd not get to see him again.

However, the second time came to be when Mike announced a small Factsheet Five party being held at his home in Rensselaer, NY, just outside Albany. I immediately resolved to go, although I didn't know how to drive at the time. I'm sort of fuzzy on who I conned to drive me all the way up there, to drop me off in front of Mike's house and let me hang out for hours... whoever you are, thanks again.

I remember another attendee looking like I did over Mike's massive wall of books, pamphlets, stories and volumes along his living room wall, and saying "This... this is the most amazing collection of alternative thinking and revolutionary thought I've ever seen." I felt the same way; Mike didn't just acquire, he collected and cared about what he was reading. The house had cats, strange mailed-in items, stacks of paper, and was a real amazing collection of the power of the written word overpowering nearly everything else. I had a fantastic time.

Like all things, Mike's time with Factsheet Five hit a major wall when the amount of himself that he had been pouring years into finally caught up with him, and he took the whole magazine down. He donated his zine collection to a library, closed up shop, and basically disappeared. Myself and other lifetime subscribers got a small, tiny tiny "zine" from Mike that he put out some months later, more like a "get it finally out of my system" project than anything else, and then he was gone.

Factsheet Five went on for a while without him, and it's more sad to me than anything else, although the people who worked on them sweat just as hard as any normal editor in trying to put together the magazine. But computers were becoming a bigger part of the process and they got to do a ground-up reboot of the production, and so I myself drifted away after a few issues. I don't diminish their work; they just weren't the heroic figure I saw in Mike, burning himself to the bone to bring us so many fascinating works.

Imagine my delight when a couple years ago, I discovered Mike Gunderloy's websites. He runs a number of them from Lark Farm, raising his family, working on his current computer-related projects and living a good life. To be honest, his writings show a guy comfortable with his world, loving his wife and children, and living out where the air is fresh. It's like a little slice of heaven, and if anyone deserves heaven on earth, it's Mike Gunderloy.

Discuss

posted by Jason Scott at 1:37:47 AM | permalink

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