A Postcard from Germany

So, I forgot until now that I can write entries in TextEdit at the hotel I'm staying at here in Berlin, which doesn't have an Internet connection, and then push them online when I get to the conference center where Wizards Of OS is being held (which has wireless and the whole shebang), so... you all get a special late-night entry which isn't just about media consumption. Jeez.

The trip, so far, has been a lot of fun. The flight out was a bit of a bear (San Francisco => Dallas => thunderstorm (while grounded) => Zurich => Berlin), but it gave me a chance to write up my speech properly, and sleep fairly efficiently, too.

Actually, the highlight of the transit period was getting to 'mail' Holly from Zurich airport, through their pay-only WiFi network, by clicking on a text ad from one of their 2 or 3 free sites to get to Amazon.com. Then I wrote a book recommendation that gets sent to the email address of your choice, but which was actually a message for Holly telling her I'd landed safely in Europe. Yes, it's a bit like the Mr.Wehadababyit'saboy reverse charges trick, but stupider - hey, nobody said I wasn't a l33t hacker type, hawhaw.

After that, a check-in to the hotel, a walk through the near-center of Berlin (graffiti, outdoor cafes, bicycles, enough sun that my neck is kinda pinkish) to the conference center, where I managed to meet up with Andreas Lange of the German computer museum/archives, and later on, went to a rather German dinner with the whole game archiving crew, including Henry Lowood at Stanford and Istvan Fabian of the wonderful CAPS Project from Hungary.

As for today, Friday, we had a good presentation on videogame preservation at Wizards Of OS (I talked about the Archive's DMCA exemption, and the very beginnings of our classic software archiving, and the other game-related collections like machinima and speed runs that are proving easier to find/preserve) - also saw Wendy Seltzer (one of the EFF lawyers) there, who I last saw at Ars Electronica in Austria in 2001, thereby concretely proving how inefficient I am at networking, considering she's also based in the Bay Area, hah.

Then we went to see Andreas' excellent collection of 4,000 classic game titles, which is in the same building as the more modern collection for the German videogame age rating systems, who are part of the same organization and have accrued 11,000 boxed titles and 18,000 Betas - wow. Oh, and the guy from the German ratings board wants me to tell you all they don't ban blood from games, that's just silly publishers trying to get lower age ratings (the Wikipedia page explains it a little differently, though). They're not so keen on swastikas, though, and that's official. Wonder how Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich will do? :)

Finally, caught the end of the German launch of the Creative Commons licenses tonight, with speeches from a friend of Janko's (both he and Janko just released their new German-language commercially published books as PDF under CC licenses, go you guys!), Bjoern from Textone, who talked about how much CC-licensed netlabels rocked. Then I ran into Bjoern, who is v.cool, post-talk, and a few other netlabel guys, including Thomas Hoeverkamp, Moritz from Phlow, and, most interestingly, Prymer from Tokyodawn.

For those of you keeping track, Prymer formed one of the more influential labels in netlabel history, doing .MODs all the way back in 1996 or so, and I consider TDR's releases to be seminal. But they decided to take the vast majority of their old .MOD releases offline, even from scene.org, a couple of years back, and I ended up putting them back online, which was in line with what their .nfo files said about free redistribution - and Prymer was not, not, not happy at all.

So he was there, and as I feared, we pretty much had an in-person, stand-up knock-down argument about those old TDR .MODs (no actual knocking down), and well, we ended up with me removing the Tokyo Dawn files from the modsoulbrother archives, on the spot, using my laptop.

I'm not sure whether some of them will come back at some point soon (with Prymer's explicit permission, that is), but I'm really inclined to leave them removed. I'm really not going to comment on whether I think he's right or not - all I know is that I feel that I made my point, and I think he understands why I care. I'm going to make sure that, even if I'm not hosting them online, there are at least copies still in existence if anyone cares about them in the future.

Anyhow, tomorrow is the last day of the conference, and I'm going to try to get a little sightseeing in before heading to the emulation panel (which I'm just a spectator in), and then to the airport to London to see my folks, hurrah!