00:00SPEAKERso after we talked about hitman on the patron episode this week yes i started thinking
00:07SPEAKERabout it and i was like do you think you could make a hitman level that's a Turing complete
00:13SPEAKERstate machine whoa huh because if you think about it each of those each of the people
00:20SPEAKERis a transistor is well is a is a logic is a switch yeah and they're symbols right yeah like
00:29SPEAKERlike if you if you kill the photographer helmet kruger's loop starts working differently that's
00:36SPEAKERtrue can you pass and they can pass characters can pass state from one to the other so could you
00:41SPEAKERbuild a hitman level that is a Turing complete state machine with the ability to do combinational
00:49SPEAKERlogic finite states push down all that stuff and get to the point that you could actually
00:54SPEAKERdo computation with murder can i can i assume that the on-off state in this analogy is represented by
01:01SPEAKERalive and dead i mean the problem with the on-off state is it's probably a one-way transition for
01:05SPEAKERmost of the people a good point but there's always more people is the way i'm thinking about it that's
01:12SPEAKERtrue yes maybe maybe it's not the named characters maybe it's like the janitor so they just replace
01:17SPEAKERthe old janitor with a new janitor and then you know magic time wouldn't you need you probably
01:23SPEAKERneed thousands of agent 47s to actually power uh operations at more than like one every 20 minutes
01:31SPEAKERoh i don't think it would be a fast turn complete machine but but like but like the thing is if you
01:36SPEAKERthink about it 47 is like the counter on the paper tape right so 47 is going down the going past this
01:43SPEAKERpast the symbols and it's it's it maintained 47 knows what 47 knows and 47 adjusts what happens
01:51SPEAKERbased on the state of what 47 knows and the state of the characters he means and chooses to either
01:55SPEAKERkill or not kill on a on a on a state-by-state basis tape-by-tape basis i don't know this might
02:02SPEAKERnot even be possible if you were able to pull those feet off what is the first problem or
02:06SPEAKERcomputation you would feed into your murder computer oh uh what is six times seven that's
02:12SPEAKERthat's it that's the last question right yeah the only one that matters what else is there to do
02:17SPEAKERactually there's one more thing to do yes as soon as someone runs doom on hitman
02:23SPEAKERthen i will know that we have uh achieved our apotheosis as a species
02:30SPEAKERhow how does doom display when it's running on hitman is doom blood
03:00SPEAKERwelcome to brad and will made a tech pod i'm will i'm brad brad i'm real tired man yeah what's going
03:13SPEAKERon oh look it was late it's early last night it was late and now it's early i apologize you uh
03:19SPEAKERyou're you're way more of a night owl than i am and yet sometimes i'm like hey we need to record
03:23SPEAKERreally early tomorrow because i've got a packed day you were late last night though was i i don't
03:28SPEAKERknow you're like 10 that's late for you that's sort of late for me yeah like look i don't doubt
03:34SPEAKERthat you're not awake at 10 but it's all it's unusual that i see you online and posting at
03:38SPEAKER10 because you have good mental slash data hygiene habits more than me say there are gradations of
03:44SPEAKERawake some of them allow for uh sending messages on discord and some do not i was uh i went to bed
03:52SPEAKERat about three last night because i made some choices well so i finished my stream at like
03:58SPEAKERmidnight maybe you've got a slightly differently structured day than i do let's say look naps are
04:04SPEAKERa important part of my days sometimes um i yeah i i woke up i mean i i i finished the stream i
04:11SPEAKERlike loaded all the dish the dinner dishes in the dishwasher and uh then i went out and jean and i
04:19SPEAKERtalked because like the only time we get to talk when there's not an eight-year-old around is at
04:23SPEAKERtwo o'clock in the morning and we were talking for a long time and then we were like oh damn
04:28SPEAKERit's three o'clock so i was like i gotta go record my fleet and uh then i then i went to bed went
04:34SPEAKERright to sleep i'm sorry to record your what what have you not been following i've been doing a uh
04:39SPEAKERthree-part film series by the time people hear this it'll be gone forever fleet it's telling me
04:44SPEAKERyou're fleeting do you not know do you know are you not you're not up with the fleets you're not
04:48SPEAKERdown with the fleeting i've heard the term fleet who uh i think i've avoided finding out what it
04:53SPEAKERmeans it's twitter it's a 30-second video on twitter that's like an instagram story
04:57SPEAKERthat just disappears after 24 hours ephemeral i see yeah but you can download them and there's
05:02SPEAKERlike look there's it's a stupid thing but i wanted to you know make so i did a fleet one day when i
05:10SPEAKERwas brushing my teeth at three o'clock in the morning because i was hopeful that somebody the
05:14SPEAKERnext morning would wake up check twitter look at it and be like while they're brushing their teeth
05:18SPEAKERthey'd be like oh hey will did a fleet what is this and then they're brushing their teeth while
05:22SPEAKERthey're watching my teeth yeah they're like oh podcasters they're just like us yeah exactly and
05:28SPEAKERthen the next day i continued the mouth hygiene the oral hygiene uh uh trilogy with some with some uh
05:36SPEAKERmouth washing just all right and then the the exciting conclusion to the trilogy i hope is
05:41SPEAKERthat you find a way to both hold your phone and floss at the same time so i use a flosser stick
05:46SPEAKERdo you not use all those oh that's cheating that's so much better because i actually do it if i have
05:50SPEAKERto put both of my my mouth is small and my hands are enormous so like that is a problem put both
05:55SPEAKERfinger both hands in my mouth to floss realistically it doesn't happen enough too early for this mental
06:00SPEAKERimagery uh i should probably just move on to the topic i was gonna ask do you do you make like
06:05SPEAKERcopious use of uh night shift style like you know color shift color palette stuff at night you have
06:11SPEAKERto right surely if you're staying up that late well but i okay so i can't when i'm streaming
06:14SPEAKERbecause people complain that the colors on games are weird if you turn that stuff on on windows
06:19SPEAKERwait on the rest of the stuff that's on but they're up late too they should also be using
06:24SPEAKERman the okay so look the world is a is a sphere and our time zones here where it's dark are
06:31SPEAKERdifferent than the time zones in other areas it's shocking but right now somewhere else on earth
06:37SPEAKERit's like two o'clock in the morning man we should do an episode about that what look i don't want to
06:43SPEAKERi kind of don't want to admit this but i'm going to when we were talking to doug the other day
06:46SPEAKERand we were talking about bouncing signals around the sun i suddenly like in my head for the first
06:52SPEAKERtime i had an orb i had a mental mental model of how of like like i knew why it happened before
07:00SPEAKERand i knew that i knew the effects but i had never built the mental model of how the solar system
07:04SPEAKERworked and like why the constellations are different in the winter than in the summer and
07:09SPEAKERanyway mortal mechanics man they're they're important to think about yeah everybody should
07:15SPEAKERspend more time thinking about look just play some carpal that's all you need what are we
07:18SPEAKERtalking about this week brad uh the hottest technology of the white band wait hang on i've
07:27SPEAKERgot ar i meant to google machine learning i really meant to google this so i could just throw it out
07:35SPEAKERwithout having to look this up the hottest technology of the third century bc what paper
07:45SPEAKERum paper like e-paper like little balls floating in liquid that you can charge and make lighter or
07:51SPEAKERdarker magazines dude oh i just talk on a magazine yeah right that's why we're doing this largely
07:58SPEAKERwe're gonna we're talking about tech magazines of the past and our experience with them reading them
08:02SPEAKERi guess working on them wishing you had worked on them in my case i just checked my navel what
08:08SPEAKERi was gazing at it ah okay i mean hopefully this is i don't know if i'm comfortable saying this
08:16SPEAKERright hopefully a lot of other people also want to gaze at your navel or this episode is gonna be
08:21SPEAKERthis weird so it's gonna be a wash if they don't but uh yeah like how did this come about you
08:27SPEAKERfound that little article about the founding of future so which is the publisher that you worked
08:32SPEAKERfor a friend a friend of mine she sent that to me and was like hey this might make good podcast
08:38SPEAKERtopic and it it's about uh chris anderson not wired's chris anderson who went on to make drones
08:44SPEAKERat 3d robotics but uh uh future slash ted chris anderson uh who was my first boss's boss maybe
08:54SPEAKERboss's boss's boss when i started at maximum pc and uh then left well kind of was run off by the
09:01SPEAKERinvestment bankers uh and went to found ted as a non-profit in like 2001 or 2002 um founding both
09:09SPEAKERfuture and ted is like kind of a fairly impressive resume i guess look i could tell you some stories
09:17SPEAKERuh but the the thing about chris i i didn't know i like chris i interacted with chris maybe four
09:24SPEAKERtimes in the time i was there but all of them were very positive interactions uh and he had started
09:30SPEAKERfuture in the uk as a publisher uh in in the mid-90s or early 90s i guess
09:38SPEAKERas a bank loan as a was it an amstrad magazine or an amiga magazine i forget which it was an
09:44SPEAKERamstrad amstrad and he's he went to the bank and said hey i need 30 000 pounds to start this this
09:49SPEAKERmagazine um i think that there's an underserved market and at the time in the uk like magazines
09:57SPEAKERwere were were a hot computer magazines were a hot commodity because everybody was buying different
10:03SPEAKERcomputers and unlike in the us where we were buying like ness's and atari's that were basically
10:07SPEAKERjust like cartridge eating machines where you can play games in the uk a lot of people were were
10:12SPEAKERbuying you know amigas and comets well commodore commodore 64s and then amigas and and you know
10:18SPEAKERspectrum zx's and tv computers yeah uh like things that you could actually write code for but they
10:24SPEAKERall hooked up the tvs right pretty much i think most of them use tvs as monitors you could get a
10:28SPEAKERreal monitor but you could also plug in a tv like all the even in that era all the computers i was
10:33SPEAKERexposed to in the in the states i think required a monitor i don't think any of the like the apple
10:37SPEAKER2e's at my grade school could be hooked up to a tv you know like i've just always been fascinated by
10:41SPEAKERthe idea of a full-on computer that kind of hooks up like a console i think the z the z what is it
10:47SPEAKERzed spectrum or something there were a couple of computers that were just like state machines with
10:51SPEAKERswitches and lights on the front hang on i feel like there's a ground rule we need to iron out
10:55SPEAKERhere i know i shouldn't have said zed are we doing z or zed on this episode look when it's a computer
11:01SPEAKERthat i know only from talking to people from the uk in the 80s i probably call it zed because that's
11:06SPEAKERwhat they've always called it for me that's yeah um but like i have no personal experience with any
11:12SPEAKERof those computers and this was well before the time i knew chris around around 2000 like early
11:16SPEAKER2000 um and at that time his interaction with them so he founded a future in the uk he started
11:24SPEAKERa bunch of computer magazines they became the brands that you know today in a lot of cases and
11:30SPEAKERand like that's a lineage that went forward for a really long time including like magazines like
11:34SPEAKERedge and uh we we were talking in a different discord with some friends about t3 a few years
11:40SPEAKERa few weeks ago yeah with pc gamer pc gamer in the us um a bunch of other stuff now video game player
11:47SPEAKERi think was one of theirs but i could be wrong um at least in the uk and then and then in the mid-90s
11:52SPEAKERhe came over to the us and founded imagine as a licensor for all the uk brands god i completely
12:03SPEAKERis that where is that going where i think it's going oh just wait yeah completely forgot about
12:07SPEAKERthat aspect of it wow yeah we're gonna paul harvey this one so uh he founded imagine and uh like that
12:16SPEAKERthat included brands such as uh uh what was the unofficial playstation magazine
12:23SPEAKERopm no that's the official that was the official playstation um uh well anyway uh pc gamer pc
12:31SPEAKERaccelerator p oh god pc accelerator look we don't need to talk about the problematic history of pc
12:39SPEAKERaccelerator in retrospect but it was a different time back then and mistakes were made those might
12:43SPEAKERas well just for people who never saw that magazine that was very much the like games and
12:47SPEAKERgirls magazine well there was like a maxim for gamers so but the real story on that was it was
12:54SPEAKERthey brought a uk lad magazine type magazine which which at that point where we're dominating the uk
13:02SPEAKERnew stand market like like ad take a topic that's of interest to early 20s men and add women to it
13:09SPEAKERand that would like that would sell really well in it unsurprisingly in a country where they're
13:13SPEAKERused to having topless women on the sixth page of their newspapers um uh so anyway uh
13:23SPEAKERyeah he did he launched launched that uh and one of the magazines that they launched in the early
13:28SPEAKER90s was this magazine called dot net and it started out as the magazine for normal people
13:34SPEAKERwho wanted to understand the internet because the internet was harder to get than a magazine at that
13:38SPEAKERpoint um and like there were articles it was kind of like when you would go to sam's or costco here
13:45SPEAKERand you'd see the internet for dummies which was basically just like a list of cool websites in
13:50SPEAKERbook form and like how to use slip and ppp maybe at the beginning and like what a web like there
13:55SPEAKERwere there were when i bought internet for dummies it was like here's what a web browser is here's
14:00SPEAKERwhat usenet is here's what irc is here's what email is here's some apps that you can use some
14:04SPEAKERapplications you can use to access those things and then you know then the back two-thirds of
14:10SPEAKERthat book was here's websites about finance here's websites about star wars here's websites and it
14:16SPEAKERwas just like a big listing of cool websites uh dot net i i never actually saw a copy of dot net
14:22SPEAKERbut seems like that so okay imagine founded uh in 97 i think they spun they they started uh ign i
14:31SPEAKERwas gonna say original originally it was the imagine games network right the imagine games
14:36SPEAKERnetwork indeed i don't i don't think it i assume it no longer stands for that i don't know i think
14:40SPEAKERthat is not an acronym anymore i think it's just a whatever an acronym you know it's like it's like
14:45SPEAKERexxon or whatever anyway sure um they spun that off in 99 as a standalone company i'm sorry to
14:54SPEAKERjump in here they they did next generation or no next gen was a future property a us future
15:00SPEAKERproperty okay that was the future magazine that i read the most of by far like that was
15:04SPEAKERlook crown jewel right there yeah next next gen was a little highfalutin i won't lie it was
15:10SPEAKERpinky's out man they they portrayed it as the thinking man's video game magazine for sure but
15:14SPEAKERlike man that paper stock was so good like that cover i've never seen a magazine with a cover that
15:19SPEAKERthick and luxurious they led with matt covers before anybody else was doing matt finished
15:24SPEAKERcovers yeah i had never seen it it was like well dude this is like a magazine from the future what
15:28SPEAKERis this it was like wired and next gen were the two magazines i remember having like matt finished
15:33SPEAKERcovers yeah well before anybody anyway um so next gen they did dream they did official dreamcast
15:40SPEAKERthey did um uh i can't believe i can't remember what the playstation magazine was called
15:46SPEAKERpoor chris slate um not not not the official one i could well they did the official the
15:51SPEAKERthe unofficial one and then at some point ziff lost the license for the official one and they
15:55SPEAKERpicked it up and they converted the unofficial one into the official one okay uh they did like
16:00SPEAKERthe final years of nintendo power they did official xbox magazine uh they did uh game
16:07SPEAKERradar is a future thing was it psm no it was it was it was something that was a little thrashery
16:14SPEAKERit was a little edgy um i never i never really went for the platform specific magazine so much
16:21SPEAKERi really liked the it was into that was into the general interest stuff well i like read nintendo
16:26SPEAKERpower and i i worked next door to the opm folks for years so i had a um i i sorry not opm official
16:33SPEAKERxbox magazine folks for years like their offices were right next to ours and and uh we had a nice
16:38SPEAKERrelationship as a result of that but um so he founded he founded imagine i started in 2000 and
16:45SPEAKERwhen i started he basically like his his deal was that he would come around and you were doing final
16:50SPEAKERcovers and or when you were during the cover approval process and he would like talk to you
16:56SPEAKERbe like hey what is what is this about you know blah blah blah blah let's talk through this
16:59SPEAKERheadline and like you learned a the secret of chris is he's really good at cover he was really
17:05SPEAKERgood at covers like that was the whole future thing is we were good at covers because we wanted
17:08SPEAKERto do newsstand sales um where everybody else kind of didn't give a shit about the newsstand that was
17:13SPEAKERwhere a lot of our our our profit was um and we would talk through covers and he would ask what
17:20SPEAKERwe were doing next month and like that we'd have a 20 or 30 minute conversation every month and it
17:24SPEAKERwas it was awesome uh and that's that is uh this this article specifically talked about
17:32SPEAKERdotnet magazine which is such a weird thing to think about now yeah the article the way the
17:37SPEAKERarticle framed it was very much like hey look how weird it was to have a magazine about the
17:42SPEAKERweb and then once more people had access to websites like ah then they made a website about
17:46SPEAKERa magazine about the web it was a weird cyclical thing well and and but also like it there was a
17:53SPEAKERit's hard to imagine now that there was a time so eventually dotnet became like a magazine for
18:00SPEAKERinternet professionals like people who were you know writing html and css code and stuff like
18:05SPEAKERthat but but in the beginning the idea of a magazine about the web because there wasn't a
18:11SPEAKERwebsite about the web like it was really funny to me oh yeah i get it i mean actually i absolutely
18:18SPEAKERget it from experience because i i wrote articles for my high school newspaper about websites at a
18:23SPEAKERtime when i bet 98 percent probably of my high school class either didn't have internet access
18:31SPEAKERor didn't care about it like the school certainly didn't did you get did you get dunked in the like
18:35SPEAKERdid you get swirlies and stuff because of your nerdiness somehow i avoided that well i was by
18:39SPEAKERthem dude i don't don't even get me started on i was a senior excuse me i was a senior by that
18:45SPEAKERpoint and nobody messed with you no no it was more like a the journalism class was very much the like
18:52SPEAKERlet's fuck around for you know three weeks out of the month and then like cram out a newspaper as
19:00SPEAKERfast as possible i feel like largely like i'll put it this way when i bought a nintendo the nintendo
19:06SPEAKER64 came out during my senior year uh-huh i brought it to class and we played quite a bit of nintendo
19:12SPEAKER64 in the journalism class wave race you got waiver you got the wave race you got the mario
19:19SPEAKERmario okay pretty much at the beginning but uh anyway whatever that i would be i would be
19:24SPEAKERhorrified to see those articles at this point because they were just about like the weird
19:29SPEAKERsquaresoft snest jrpg websites i was checking out and stuff but well so it's funny because like
19:36SPEAKERthere was a period of time there when i was getting computer news and like like what's
19:43SPEAKERgoing on in hardware world and all that stuff from these rep we've talked about before like the three
19:47SPEAKERbig quake news websites which were blue news and scaries quake holio and redwood stomping ground
19:55SPEAKERstomp yeah um but but the for me the magazines filled in some gaps and added more kind of texture
20:04SPEAKERto those conversations well also i mean i assume if you're anything like me i mean the magazines
20:08SPEAKERhave been there for years and years before the web even came around right like i was
20:12SPEAKERyou know i was reading video game magazines in the 80s late 80s and then pc magazines starting
20:18SPEAKERearly to mid 90s like you know yeah so i got i was subscribing to probably pc world and pc mag
20:25SPEAKERat that point yeah neither of them were particularly useful they were all like corporate
20:29SPEAKERshit i was gonna they're very much the like first of all i don't remember which one i read i want to
20:34SPEAKERsay it was pc world but they're basically indistinguishable in my mind they're kind of the
20:37SPEAKERsame thing right they were too pc world was a little bit more cat like i think harry mccracken
20:41SPEAKERwas at pc world by that point and he was like it was a more they were focused on consumer market
20:48SPEAKERin a way that pc mag kind of never was okay it was probably pc world that i that i hewed toward but
20:53SPEAKERlike those were very much the like khaki wearing beige box like businessy they were very computer
20:59SPEAKERchronicles let's let's yes let's review the spreadsheet software and okay you know they
21:02SPEAKERoccasionally they would start reviewing graphics cards once those came into existence and like
21:06SPEAKERmention a video game here dude their their graphics cards reviews were terrible like they
21:11SPEAKERgave the voodoo one card i can't remember who it was but somebody gave the voodoo one card a bad
21:14SPEAKERreview oh boy because it didn't have a 2d component oh boy decreased 2d quality oh you know that
21:20SPEAKERsucked like i'm not gonna lie it was terrible i i didn't like that but you know the benefit was
21:25SPEAKERjust point hard hard to give up yeah right um so uh they launched dotnet in the us and uh
21:34SPEAKERnot to paul harvey again here but dotnet in the us launched with a small team including my first
21:43SPEAKERboss at future john phillips who's now at idg and working on tech hive and pc world and stuff like
21:49SPEAKERthat and uh he had come he he went on to be the executive editor of a magazine called boot which
21:59SPEAKERuh was the first computer magazine that i picked up that i was like
22:04SPEAKERthis is this is what this is amazing this thing is 96 pages and every page has something i'm
22:09SPEAKERinterested in on it right uh he had come from a place called blaster or blast i can't remember
22:17SPEAKERit was a creative labs like custom publishing thing for that yeah and and a friend of ours
22:23SPEAKERuh started his career there with john uh one jeff girst man uh so that's the story and and then when
22:35SPEAKERthey shut down dotnet dotnet failed pretty quickly in the us because they launched it right before
22:39SPEAKERwindows 95 came out and everybody got internet access and like just like once you know how to
22:43SPEAKERuse yahoo you were probably okay on the stuff that dotnet was going to tell you about as a consumer
22:48SPEAKERmore of an altavista guy but yeah sure yeah i mean look the real the real secret was metacrawler
22:53SPEAKERwhere you could search yahoo altavista lycos all at the same time um look did they have jeeves or
22:58SPEAKERnot i don't think jeeves was around yet jeeves was later really yeah jeeves was like 98 99 i never
23:04SPEAKERactually used ask jeeves i just think it's funny jeeves wasn't he was less helpful than one would
23:09SPEAKERexpect based on the marketing yes the very snooty so they they shut down dotnet and they split the
23:15SPEAKERteam and half of the people went on to mac addict to make mac addict which was a mac
23:20SPEAKERlike enthusiast book and half of the people went to boot and uh you know that that kind of
23:28SPEAKERthat you know boot became maximum pc and that's when i started i started reading maximum
23:32SPEAKERboot when it was like six or eight issues in i think and and maximum pc from the beginning and
23:39SPEAKERand uh it was a it was a had a profound effect on my life i mean earlier in the decade did you ever
23:46SPEAKERintend to work for a tech pc magazine because oh i thought i was going to be a doctor i was planning
23:52SPEAKERto go to med school totally i thought i was i you know i'd try i started out in computer science and
23:56SPEAKERin school like i thought i was going to be a programmer or something like i certainly read
24:00SPEAKERplenty of magazines in that time but i never thought i would actually get into the media um
24:05SPEAKERit turns out if you understand something really well and can also write that was an incredibly
24:09SPEAKERvaluable skill at that period of time in the 90s and 2000s for sure um i don't know i did before
24:15SPEAKERwe get into your career in in paper publishing i just oh god think back a little more on that
24:21SPEAKERearlier period like i just like doing a mental tally of all the stuff i used to read my computer
24:26SPEAKERor my friend used to buy computer shopper all the time which i feel like we have to we have to talk
24:31SPEAKERabout computer the phone book that was computer shopper it was it was literally like the thickness
24:36SPEAKERof every issue was the thickness of a phone book was it every month or was it like bi-monthly or
24:40SPEAKERquarterly or something that i don't remember you might be right that it was like a quarterly
24:45SPEAKERi think it was bi-monthly maybe or every other month you know i might have it the other way it
24:49SPEAKERmight have been bi-monthly and been twice why is bi-monthly sometimes every other month and
24:53SPEAKERsometimes twice a month i was just picking that up recently really i was just re-looking that up i
24:58SPEAKERlooked it up in the uh the capacity of of annual yeah the context of um my impression the the
25:06SPEAKERdictionary i was looking at i think it was oxford did not come out and say it but i think it's one
25:09SPEAKERof those things that just like it's like inflammable sometimes meaning it doesn't burn and sometimes
25:14SPEAKERmeaning it does burn yes it was very much just a language is fluid and has this has come to mean
25:18SPEAKERexactly the opposite of what it's supposed to mean well irregardlessly i think we should move on
25:25SPEAKERbecause what is it like semi-annual it's twice a year biannual is every other year technically
25:30SPEAKERyes but i think the correct way to do it but the definition of biannual in that
25:33SPEAKERdictionary was now that it can mean both twice a year and every other year which is like
25:39SPEAKERthis is why when people use the language wrong we have to yell at them i mean yeah i don't whatever
25:43SPEAKERi don't want to get into a debate about prescriptivism here but uh there are there there
25:49SPEAKERis there is fluidity of language that is useful and then there is fluidity that is not and that
25:53SPEAKERis very much the latter i think when you are when you are just muddying meaning it is not
25:57SPEAKERnecessarily a good kind of drift all i know is that the one time i typed irregardless into twitter
26:03SPEAKERin like 2009 i got yelled at immediately by about a massive number of people at that point probably
26:08SPEAKER10 yeah so i've never used that word again until today and we're luck i just googled computer
26:13SPEAKERshopper and it was neither bimonthly or semi-monthly it was just monthly okay but yeah the thing was
26:20SPEAKERgigantic to be a monthly well and like the thing about it was it was a it was one of those magazines
26:26SPEAKERyou didn't buy because of the magazine you bought it because of the ads uh-huh exactly because because
26:30SPEAKERthe ads in it were just as dense as they could cram a picture of hardware and a price and a name
26:39SPEAKERyep like it was it was a phone number or a website maybe both and then a spread often of like 50 or
26:48SPEAKER60 pieces of hardware at varying prices and like they advertise shipping rates there i don't think
26:55SPEAKERi ever bought anything from a computer shop also same yeah it was very much it was very much the
27:00SPEAKERsears catalog of your childhood of just i'm gonna get this to look at all the things i wish i could
27:04SPEAKERbuy yeah like let's see let's look at like the thing and here's the thing people maybe i think
27:09SPEAKERmaybe people don't understand this now but back then it was weird for there to be a case vendor
27:16SPEAKERname like a lot of the the case vendors that you knew like computex computex comp you anyway it
27:23SPEAKERdoesn't matter uh they would buy they would buy uh cases from taiwan or southeast asia manufacturers
27:33SPEAKERsoutheast asian manufacturers and then they would put a new plastic front on a new beige plastic
27:39SPEAKERfront so it like looked a little bit cooler and they'd be like we have a blah blah blah bob jones
27:43SPEAKERmodel 65 uh it's it's 45 it comes with a 50 watt power supply and you're good to go and and like
27:51SPEAKERyou just went into the screwdriver shop in your town because shipping was expensive then and you
27:56SPEAKERwouldn't you wouldn't pay to ship a case you would just grab whichever weird like variant model your
28:03SPEAKERvendor had your screwdriver shop had and build yourself in that and then boot started reviewing
28:08SPEAKERcases and computer shopper then you started seeing ads for like super micro cases and like these big
28:16SPEAKERhuge towers and all this weird stuff and it it kind of it it was from that that like cooler master
28:22SPEAKERand leon lee and all those companies emerged as kind of like premium brands in this otherwise
28:29SPEAKERultimately commoditized space yep it was a weird time it was a weird time what kind of stuff did
28:36SPEAKERyou look like memory and stuff were you that much in the weeds i think at the time that my friend
28:41SPEAKERwas buying a bunch of computer shoppers and i was i was thumbing through them i was not building
28:44SPEAKERstuff myself at that point i think computer shopper was not great it was like they were
28:49SPEAKERmore selling like integrated systems right not necessarily components so much the components
28:54SPEAKERwere in the back okay like the there were there were also there were also like your your everything
29:00SPEAKERfrom like your tiger direct style here's a here's a pre-made off-the-shelf parts like and this we we
29:09SPEAKERwill they would sell you a system that they told you like who made the motherboard and who made the
29:14SPEAKERhard drive and like all of that stuff so that you like in a in a way this was this was around the
29:22SPEAKERtime gateway started and let you do build to order pcs which was the novelty too sure like like that
29:27SPEAKERwas that was a big deal when they when that company started and that was the first time
29:32SPEAKERyou kind of could do that if you weren't ordering 50 or 100 pcs at a time from somebody sure yeah i
29:37SPEAKERthink i wouldn't when i was looking computer shopper i was too young to have my own money
29:41SPEAKERfor the most part or if i had any money it went toward video games so yeah yeah not really buying
29:45SPEAKERmuch out of there but uh i think around that same era was when i got into pc gamer pretty heavy
29:51SPEAKERbecause of that demo cd so the demo cd was the other chris anderson innovation yeah so i read
29:57SPEAKERthat and i didn't realize that in that article that was like a future thing not just a pc gamer
30:01SPEAKERthing even though that was the only one i saw over here i guess it sounds like even dot net adopted
30:06SPEAKERthat model and was putting like web publishing software on their covers dreamweaver baby uh
30:11SPEAKERright but uh like i do like that was a i i would have to look at the dates to make sure i like i
30:16SPEAKERfeel like it was a 94-ish time frame that i was getting maybe 95 i was getting pc gamer with that
30:21SPEAKERcd so i know that in 96 they had started doing cds maybe maybe they might have done floppies
30:27SPEAKERbefore that because in the uk they did floppies and all sorts of other stuff um i feel like in
30:33SPEAKERthe u.s floppies were harder because of the way our mail system like in the uk in the uk they
30:38SPEAKERthey like they bundle crazy stuff with magazines in the uk they still like model making magazines
30:43SPEAKERokay you can subscribe to a like 100 a year model making magazine where you get like a little piece
30:49SPEAKERof a wooden like a ship and you get like one section of it a month over two years subscription
30:55SPEAKERoh boy that's a way to hook somebody yeah like they do crazy stuff because like it doesn't have
31:00SPEAKERto be flat in the u.s everything has to be flat well this is bad i have now in accessing that
31:05SPEAKERquestion ended up on an archive.org page with a bunch of pc gamer cds on it demo cds well so
31:12SPEAKERthat's not a rabbit hole i need to go down but the reason i brought it up was like in a pre-internet
31:15SPEAKERcontext like that that cover cd was a massive engine of discoverability for me like there you
31:21SPEAKERknow that was playing tons of games that first of all i never bought like i played the demo and
31:25SPEAKERi was like oh that's cool i don't need to play more of that so like good yeah like like that's
31:29SPEAKERwhy i have talked so lovingly over the years about the magic carpet demo because i never bought the
31:33SPEAKERfull game i was like oh this demo this demo is pretty rad i don't know that i'm gonna go get
31:37SPEAKERmagic carpet but at least i know what it is now but like but you know that was that was a primary
31:42SPEAKERway to get to play a bunch of games for five bucks that you would have gotten to was it 10 really 10
31:48SPEAKERokay so that the innovation on the cd front is that uh you take a five dollar magazine and slap
31:55SPEAKERa 10 cent piece of plastic on it and then sell it for ten dollars five dollars and ten cents
32:01SPEAKERthe manufacturing was nothing were do you have any idea of the game game makers were not paying to
32:07SPEAKERput sometimes they paid but or did they okay that probably happened later in the beginning the disc
32:12SPEAKERwas a purely editorial process because they were really thrilled that people were making demos that
32:16SPEAKERthey could like everybody it worked for everybody because like pre-broadband really that you know
32:24SPEAKERthere weren't a game demo that was 50 or 100 megs especially like in by 96 97 the game demos were
32:31SPEAKERgetting big totally you know and by the time they were shipping games on cds making a demo that
32:36SPEAKERwould fit in a download chunk that didn't look bad was kind of kind of difficult so yeah for for
32:43SPEAKERpeople who don't remember that era or were too young uh i'm trying to remember the exact
32:48SPEAKERconversion i think a 28 8 modem at best could do a megabyte about every five minutes yeah something
32:54SPEAKERlike that if i'm not mistaken so yeah realistically you never got that yes so like something like the
32:58SPEAKERdoom shareware was like an overnight download if you could even keep your modem connected that long
33:02SPEAKERi spent the first the first music i downloaded from the internet were 128 bit kill 128 bit per
33:11SPEAKERsecond mp3s of like a bootleg dave matthews concert probably yeah look mistakes were made
33:20SPEAKERbut um did you ever download any mp2s oh yeah oh yeah i have a handful of mp2s when i when i
33:27SPEAKERat some point i cleared out my music folder and just started from scratch about 10 years ago and
33:33SPEAKERre-ripped all my cds and like left all of the horrible shit i downloaded from napster and
33:38SPEAKERwhatever else in the early 2000s and there were mp2s in there for sure nice yeah uh anyway yeah
33:46SPEAKERlike that that demo cd is like a formative memory like a very like nostalgic kind of positive thing
33:52SPEAKERfor me to look back on because like i got to play so many games for you know i couldn't i couldn't
33:57SPEAKERthis i could not be buying 50 computer games all the time but i could certainly scrape 10 bucks
34:01SPEAKERtogether to check out whatever was on that cd i should like look here let me tell you wing
34:07SPEAKERcommander 3 go on let me tell you the secret of the best job in the magazine industry in the 90s
34:15SPEAKERthat was disc editor it turns out oh that sounds so cool because those those the disc editors
34:21SPEAKERwould just sit around and play games this is my perception as a as a as a writing editor of course
34:27SPEAKERthey would sit around and just to be clear shout out to ken ken did good work but like ken was also
34:34SPEAKERreal fucking good at quake because he had to test out those demos that's right and i don't know which
34:39SPEAKERmulti-skin pack to put on the demo disc this week exactly exactly um but then like also the future
34:46SPEAKERfolks went kind of crazy like like uh pc gamer paid level designers multiple times to build
34:54SPEAKERlike they they i don't know if they sponsored it or just like paid some kid to to build the
34:58SPEAKERlevels but they built like a bunch of those tiny scale like huge kids bedroom levels where you
35:05SPEAKERwere like a little tiny quick guy inside a giant huge kids bedroom whatever the level lord classic
35:12SPEAKERyeah um and they would release those so they'd do original levels uh they did the coconut monkeys
35:18SPEAKERtapestry of injustice which i think was a gary witta jam that was a quake that was a series of
35:24SPEAKERquake two levels and every single one of them was utter bullshit like uh railgun alley was my
35:30SPEAKERfavorite because you it would spawn all 10 players in the server and the two people on either end
35:35SPEAKERwould have to turn around and run to the far ends of the alley where there were rail guns on either
35:39SPEAKERside and whoever got to the first one won every time just a draw situation like a straight up
35:44SPEAKERwild west dual situation well yeah but the the fun part about that was there were also six other
35:49SPEAKERpeople jammed in between them and the and the map was one person wide and you the quake two guy
35:56SPEAKERcouldn't jump over other quake two guys so like the people in the middle were just there was nothing
36:00SPEAKERthey could do that's they were posed that's pretty good um dude i i swear a barrel that's that's
36:07SPEAKERthat's pretty good i swear archive.org may be the best thing on the internet oh it's fantastic i am
36:12SPEAKERnow looking at not only a download of the very first pc gamer uh demo disc from december 1994
36:21SPEAKERbut like scans of the slip cover so i can tell you everything that was on it
36:25SPEAKERwhat do we got here wing commander 3 was the marquee cover of the demo disc that one probably
36:31SPEAKERmoved that one probably actually moved so so this these would move cop these would move the magazine
36:36SPEAKERtotally that was the amazing thing about them is if you got a good deal and this is this is what the
36:40SPEAKERdisk editors really did is they were it's the same thing that you did when you're at gamestop and you
36:43SPEAKERwere negotiating exclusive stuff they would yeah anyway i'm sorry i'm sorry where you know gme the
36:50SPEAKERthe internet's hottest stock yes game spot sorry i it's okay i was fine until last night i hadn't
36:56SPEAKERmade the mistake in like 10 years until yeah sorry it's never not irk veterans of that website to
37:04SPEAKERhear that i'm sorry i'm so sorry no it's fine i apologize unreservedly it was a constant uphill
37:10SPEAKERbattle for us back then um there's a lot on here like wing commander 3 blackthorne desert strike
37:17SPEAKERjazz jackrabbit a bunch of custom doom levels operation body count rise of the robots wow star
37:25SPEAKERcrusader uh load runner load runner yeah i'm sorry load runner the legend returns that was
37:33SPEAKERwell that was a terrible game that was a later one relentless relentless is great so uh bug patches
37:43SPEAKERthey list bug patches as as like this was a way to get patches for games we would get drivers we
37:49SPEAKERwould do driver like we would stack the boot the boot disk which was maybe the best part of the best
37:55SPEAKERname the only reason boot was a good name was that we hit a boot disk every issue it was not actually
37:59SPEAKERbootable for the most part i guess false advertising well we we um we did a linux issue and we i think
38:06SPEAKERwe built a linux front end that would install slackware or or it must have been gentu but i
38:14SPEAKERdon't think maybe debian probably back then maybe red hat right probably red hat and debian if i
38:19SPEAKERthink anyway i'm trying to remember which distros were even around back then i why would you why
38:23SPEAKERwould you do that to people i i once downloaded all of slackware uh overnight and put it on floppy
38:28SPEAKERdisks and installed it to my pentium 75 and boy was that a mistake yeah it was hard to use back
38:33SPEAKERthen like i mean you know the back then like no hardware was supported out of the box so it's like
38:38SPEAKERokay i'm sitting at this command prompt i have no idea what to do now also it's just a command
38:43SPEAKERprompt there's no gooey also there's no modem support so i can't connect to the internet to
38:47SPEAKERfind out what to do with this thing i guess i'm gonna stare at this command prompt for another
38:52SPEAKERhour and then format the hard drive and go back to windows well and even if you had the internet
38:56SPEAKERyou wouldn't have been able to look anything up because you didn't have a browser right right it
39:00SPEAKERwas it was a primordial primordial era for for linux for sure so um but like we would we nvidia
39:09SPEAKERwould drop driver updates for us to put on and effects and those guys ati and we would put all
39:15SPEAKERthe latest like you'd get a new issue of the magazine to have a bunch of shareware like apps
39:19SPEAKERa bunch of games and then it would have drivers like your video card and sound card drivers for
39:25SPEAKERthe popular hardware i may have to think i may have to dos box some of these demo CDs at some
39:31SPEAKERpoint dude i would i would totally get in play some some hyperscape with your hyper hyper slide
39:36SPEAKERwhatever the the skating hockey cyber game was i wonder there was a bunch of weird stuff you know
39:42SPEAKERfor sure what was that i remember there was an early 3d game called g something where you were
39:47SPEAKERlike a cop and you had to be flew around and they had colored lights on the city uh it's a g police
39:54SPEAKERg police was it i think yeah yeah god man i wonder if i wonder if they have every demo cd they ever
40:01SPEAKERput out on here probably there's a the so i uploaded uh when before i left we had a wall of
40:08SPEAKERmagazines and one of the things i did was upload pdfs of all the issues that i had pdfs for um
40:16SPEAKERyou know the pre-press pd pdfs not the low res janky ones that usually published and i sent them
40:22SPEAKERall up to archive to the folks at archive.org so there's a great run of maximum pc from like
40:27SPEAKER2000 to 2010 or whenever i left that's fine that's fantastic i sincerely hope archive.org never goes
40:34SPEAKERaway me too archive.org is good stuff yeah um so yeah like should we talk about your time working
40:41SPEAKERin that sphere like what was that like you want you want you had magazine questions is what you
40:46SPEAKERimplied to me well i i wanted well i didn't want to get into my thing first but i want to know what
40:50SPEAKERit was like to work in print because like once it was clear that i was going to write for money
40:55SPEAKERyeah i thought and hoped i was also going to end up in print and then i didn't and i was always
40:59SPEAKERvery bitter about it but oh i'll i'll get into that later um so so yeah like like what do you
41:07SPEAKERwant to know about i guess i guess i mean well so i guess well building on what i just said like we
41:12SPEAKERboth got in right around that inflection point where print started losing surrendering its
41:17SPEAKERprimacy to online right but it took some time and it was like kind of a weird process where like
41:23SPEAKERdifferent people definitely had different opinions about what mattered more whether like the magazine
41:27SPEAKERstill had like a prestige value that if you were working in nascent online you definitely did not
41:32SPEAKERyou were just sort of like the people were supposed to shut up and sit there and publish
41:36SPEAKERstuff every day instead of once a month and like publishers game publishers in my case like didn't
41:41SPEAKERnecessarily like think very highly of online outlets at first that was back when square like
41:46SPEAKERwouldn't talk to you guys because they thought you were all dirty pirates right right yes like
41:49SPEAKERif you at e3 and e3 you try to go get assets from them they're like unless you were print or
41:54SPEAKERbroadcast they were like looked at you very funny like who the fuck are you like you don't need this
42:00SPEAKERright okay right so like i think i think there were cases where people at game spot literally had
42:05SPEAKERto just say yeah we're broadcast yes please give us your beta tape we are yes we are absolutely
42:10SPEAKERbroadcast me look at these cameras they're broadcast cameras see we're we're in tv we'll
42:15SPEAKERtake that beta tape and not put it on a website so we uh so i started in 2000 in the middle of
42:22SPEAKER2000 at maximum pc the first issue i had written as a freelancer for a few since february since the
42:29SPEAKERfebruary 2000 issue which probably i was working on in november december of 90 99 and my phone keeps
42:35SPEAKERgoing off i'm sorry uh and as a result uh we uh like i i had done a lot of writing but i didn't
42:44SPEAKERreally understand what the process of making a magazine was like for until i went to work there
42:47SPEAKERin june of 2000 and the first issue i worked on was either the last or second to last issue
42:54SPEAKERthat we sent like physical we we've sent a physical copy of the magazine on film to
43:02SPEAKERthe printer to be printed like we didn't after that we went to pdfs uh which our production
43:09SPEAKERdepartment made i think by shooting and drum scanning by shooting and drum scanning the the
43:16SPEAKERthe the uh like so okay basically basically like an old school physical process i assume
43:25SPEAKERwell so no they were doing desktop publishing to make the pages right but the drum scanning
43:30SPEAKERi mean specifically sounds like a like some kind of optical or physical thing yeah so a
43:34SPEAKERdrum scanner is i i never actually saw it working but my understanding is drum scanner is a thing
43:38SPEAKERthat you hook the you put the page on the facing out on and then it spins it multiple times and
43:44SPEAKERdoes a whole bunch of passes until it collects enough pixels uh to accumulate like a 300 dpi plus
43:51SPEAKERimage of the of the of the item that's wild as opposed to like a flatbed where the bar just
43:56SPEAKERmoves once and that's what you get yeah um so we would i so i didn't work on that part of the
44:02SPEAKERmagazine at this time so this is a lot of me like inferring from listening to what was going on on
44:06SPEAKERthe other side but they would make pages in quark express and then they would print them and then
44:12SPEAKERthey would photograph those print pages in a dark room with a long lens on a camera from like 15
44:19SPEAKERfeet away and build color separations out of that image huh and then they would send those color
44:25SPEAKERseparations to the printer and that's how they would print the magazine wow that's a lot more
44:29SPEAKERsteps than i would have thought yeah like you would have these things called blue lines that
44:33SPEAKERwere the basic final proofs so the editor you know in this case john phil uh yeah john phillips at
44:39SPEAKERthat time would would go with the art director at the end of every month and they would go down and
44:43SPEAKERlook at all the pages that were ready to go and make sure that there weren't any errors and like
44:47SPEAKERif you had a typo or something you have to fix it was a huge pain in the ass and it involved
44:50SPEAKERdeveloping film and all sorts of stuff to get that changed uh the two months later we switched over
44:55SPEAKERto sending pdfs over the internet the the publisher got internet access the printer got internet
45:01SPEAKERaccess is my recollection but i could be wrong on that and uh we would do high res high dpi pdfs
45:08SPEAKERand send those and like a magazine a full copy of the magazine was like so 50 uh well the magazines
45:15SPEAKERwere pretty big back then so probably 75 pages because we had a lot of pads and this is the thing
45:18SPEAKERpeople also didn't know when you when the magazine got bigger it was because there were more ads
45:24SPEAKERso the base ratio of of content pages to add pages was usually 50 50 a future yeah
45:32SPEAKERso we'd have a 96 page book and 48 pages of content 48 pages of ads and then two covers
45:39SPEAKERand uh we would we would if we if the ad team was like hey we have there would be a cut off
45:46SPEAKERusually 10 days before the issue was ready to go when we started laying out pages where we had to
45:52SPEAKERsay okay we can at this point we can either make con make stretch the content out more by doing
45:57SPEAKERlike more big picture spreads and stuff like that or we can we have some articles we can drop in or
46:00SPEAKERwe can do extra reviews or a longer how-to section or longer letters page or whatever if you need to
46:05SPEAKERsell more ads and they would say hey we have more ads coming get ready for them so there had to be a
46:09SPEAKERspecific ratio of content ads they couldn't they just they weren't willing to just jam in multiple
46:14SPEAKERpages of ads without a break we would never go below 48 pages so the smallest book size we could
46:21SPEAKERdo was 96 pages i see we would never go below 48 pages of edit content sometimes as the pa as the
46:28SPEAKERmagazine got bigger just because like it's not like we staffed up in december when we had a 200
46:33SPEAKERpage book you know we had to figure out how to make 200 pages with the same eight people that
46:37SPEAKERwe had the whole rest of the time i know your perception brad is as an online as some sort of
46:43SPEAKERonline chud is that uh slackers is that we were we were just dicking around playing quake three
46:49SPEAKERfor three weeks a month and that's where this is going that is exactly should we just get into it
46:53SPEAKERthat's exactly where this is going because that was in fact my perception look i mean
46:58SPEAKERwell go ahead no i'm just gonna say this this inimical attitude that our that our management
47:04SPEAKERwas putting against us they were pitting online against the the print people and they did that
47:09SPEAKERto oppress the workers brad they did that to keep us yeah that not organic because like i mean i
47:13SPEAKERcame in late like i said and like there but there was absolutely was animosity between print and
47:18SPEAKERonline at the same company or in the same organization yes we absolutely had that too
47:22SPEAKERthere was absolutely like this battle of wills going on and and some haughtiness and all that
47:26SPEAKERstuff but like yeah i mostly wanted to ask like what was your working life like working on that
47:31SPEAKERmagazine like did it uh ebb and flow with the the you know deadline and and needing to go to print
47:37SPEAKERor was it like a pretty steady year-round like because i because i know people who worked in
47:44SPEAKERprint who were very much the former and i'll get into that in a minute but so a normal month like
47:50SPEAKERwe had we had we did 13 issues a year so we did one every four weeks no matter what oh wow okay
47:56SPEAKERand then uh we also did specials on top of that so we did two to four special issues a year that
48:04SPEAKERwere partly repurposed content partly original stuff so and everybody contributed to everything
48:09SPEAKERso it was a weird situation in that like there were more basically the first week of every month
48:18SPEAKERwas writing anything that was not time sensitive so like advice columns how to's uh any of the
48:25SPEAKERfeatures that were like how to oriented stuff like that and uh the next the next week was usually
48:34SPEAKERthings like um uh basically the first week of the month we would plan the whole thing out
48:41SPEAKERand write anything that was non that was not timely right the and that would happen over
48:46SPEAKERthe first two weeks usually the last two weeks were reviews because you know the the print
48:52SPEAKERprocess like we were operating six months ahead six weeks ahead usually so like we would we would
48:58SPEAKERrelease an issue it would take two weeks at the press and then two weeks in the mail and we were
49:03SPEAKERwe were looking at like anywhere from a two uh three to six week lag based on how long it took
49:08SPEAKERmail to get there for people so we wanted to get the hardware the the very newest hardware possible
49:13SPEAKERand have the minimum time and the shortest time that could be was about two weeks if everything
49:17SPEAKERlike lined up right and you lived right next door to the printing printing plant uh so so and the
49:23SPEAKERnews to and we knew what the newsstand dates were we never had any idea what the ship that what the
49:27SPEAKERshipping date was going to be which was always a weird situation to be in because like we were
49:30SPEAKERhaving to agree to embargoes and we're like okay here's here is the date we'll leave the printing
49:34SPEAKERpress and here's the date we'll leave the distributors and every after everything after
49:38SPEAKERthat we don't know about god dude i cannot even imagine the moving target of of navigating that
49:44SPEAKERwhole process with publishers and people that are yeah embargoing the content and not knowing
49:49SPEAKERwhen you'll be able to post it because like that what god i never even thought about that like
49:53SPEAKERthat is certainly an advantage that online had of like oh yeah all other things being equal at least
49:58SPEAKERwe know that the second this is fully ready to go we can just click a button and it is live out there
50:02SPEAKERimmediately like we never had to worry about like god are we gonna is this review of are we gonna
50:06SPEAKERmiss our like deadline to the printer by one day and it's gonna be a month late or what well i was
50:10SPEAKERgonna say like often the last week of the month as the magazine is so the last week of the month
50:14SPEAKERwas production week and that's when pages are being put on put in quark and laid out and like
50:20SPEAKERthere's an editorial process where everybody looks because the cost of redoing that stuff is very high
50:25SPEAKERyeah there's an editorial price there's an editorial process where the assigning editor
50:30SPEAKERreads those pages the managing editor reads those pages the proofreader reads those pages the editor
50:36SPEAKERand the the original author and the editor the editor reads those pages and then the original
50:39SPEAKERauthor goes back and works with the assigning editor to like incorporate all the changes that
50:44SPEAKERwere requested and and additions and whatever and it's important to note that stuff had already been
50:49SPEAKERedited and read once when it was a word document so like you did it you did it multiple times
50:54SPEAKERand you like you'd have to copy fit so that you'd cut stuff out so that you had because
50:58SPEAKERlike the reviews were short you had like 250 words on a full page review and and so like we wouldn't
51:06SPEAKERlike on a huge month the most i ever wrote i think was probably 20 000 words
51:10SPEAKERgeez man um over those four weeks yeah like sometimes sometimes that would be
51:16SPEAKERhey and nvidia has a new video card coming out we need you to come down to their headquarters
51:21SPEAKERbring a test bed and they're going to set you up in a conference room for two days
51:26SPEAKERwhere you get the you jam the new video card in and you do all of your normal benchmarks
51:30SPEAKERand you that's the and then you write the preview and you have literally the day like i know what
51:36SPEAKERday i'm going to go in to get that to start doing those benchmarks i know what damn to get at the
51:40SPEAKERtech brief i write the tech part i go down and do the benchmarks and then we put it all together
51:44SPEAKERliterally the day before the magazine has to meet the printer that's pretty hectic um so like so
51:50SPEAKERlike i mean partly your perception is correct but partly we also spent probably five times as much
51:55SPEAKERtime five or ten times as much many person hours on every single thing that went into the print
52:01SPEAKERpublication that you guys would have spent on the web because like our web process was like
52:07SPEAKERthe the writer writes it the assigning editor looks at it the online editor looks at it and then
52:11SPEAKERsomebody matches publish and if there's comments about errors or something then we go back and look
52:15SPEAKERat it and make a correction pretty much yeah yeah i don't know a couple things jump out to me from
52:19SPEAKERwhat you just said like 250 words for a review sounds paltry to the point of embarrassment to
52:24SPEAKERme because like a game spot like a thousand word review was short yeah it's like it's like oh you
52:29SPEAKERonly had a thousand words to say about this we've got infinite space why don't you get into a little
52:32SPEAKERmore detail but like but on the other hand like so like looking back on that process when i hear like
52:38SPEAKERoh you only had to write 250 words like that sounds i can do that in 10 minutes whatever but but but
52:43SPEAKERthe times the the few times that i have had to write something as comprehensive as a review in
52:48SPEAKERthat short of space it actually turned out to be incredibly difficult you use you have to really
52:52SPEAKERbe strategic like it is it i would much rather write a thousand words any day than write 250
52:58SPEAKERwords yeah because it's like making a case for this product you can kind of let it all just hang
53:02SPEAKERout when you have that much space just sort of ramble all over the place yeah like the the kind
53:06SPEAKERof the economy of language and meaning that you have to work with and that sort of space is pretty
53:10SPEAKERtough yeah the other thing i was going to mention is just like talking about the lead times on
53:14SPEAKERpublish and and having to have everything ready ahead of time like another nice thing we had in
53:20SPEAKERour in our favor was that the print people at least for game reviews the builds of games they
53:25SPEAKERwere reviewing were so much earlier than what we had to work with i mean ideally we were reviewing
53:30SPEAKERboxed factory finished retail copies of games but at least the debug builds we were getting were
53:37SPEAKERlike basically final like granted games were coming in way less hot back then but yeah like
53:41SPEAKERthe print people were reviewing games four to six weeks early like playing through games like four
53:46SPEAKERto six weeks earlier than we were so like who knows what state the review like who knows what
53:50SPEAKERthey were having to sort of gloss over or take into account as like oh that'll probably be fixed
53:55SPEAKERlike that that sounds like such a messy process to me so one of the things i did when they made
53:59SPEAKERme editor of the magazine was we stopped reviewing early games like we would we would take them and
54:06SPEAKERwe would look at them but the review would be based on something that was closer to final and
54:09SPEAKERif we lagged a month on reviews we were fine with it because we only did like one or two game reviews
54:13SPEAKERa month sure um it that that was a problem reviewing getting the the manufacturers to not
54:19SPEAKERsend pre-final hardware was a real challenge because like we would get we wouldn't get like
54:24SPEAKERdebug boards with like wires hanging off of them occasionally we did but we knew like that was like
54:29SPEAKERwe got debug board voodoo five six thousands or something oh wow and that was fucking awesome but
54:35SPEAKERlike yeah and literally with debug board in that era was like somebody had hand-soldered wires
54:41SPEAKERjumping oh my god like pin outs on chips and transistors and and capacitors and stuff like
54:46SPEAKERthat that's incredible um but but it wasn't we would never so we as a result of the print issue
54:55SPEAKERwe had really good guidelines on like what was allowed and what wasn't allowed in terms of early
55:02SPEAKERcoverage and we were really good at transmitting that information to the vendors because we'd done
55:06SPEAKERa lot and the price of failure was really high and i know i know we have to wrap up but uh and
55:12SPEAKERthe like we just didn't do ndas like we didn't sign it we we had a we had never the only embargo
55:19SPEAKERwe ever broke accidentally because of a cms error was a microsoft mouse exclusive that we had gotten
55:26SPEAKERand we broke the embargo by like two days because somebody put the data in this the date and cms
55:30SPEAKERwrong i think but but like i could go to nvidia or atr or whatever and say like look we've we've
55:36SPEAKERnever broken one of your bargos our lawyers will not let us sign embargo so if you want to have
55:41SPEAKERthis if you want to have this coverage in the magazine i can tell you when it will leave the
55:44SPEAKERfactory and i tell you when we think most people will have it but i'm not signing any paper you say
55:50SPEAKERyou're okay with that or not but that's it yeah if you want to if you want to be on the cover of the
55:54SPEAKERmagazine this is the deal yeah and and people would do it um but a because they trust us and
55:59SPEAKERb because the the online embargo would be five days before the earliest date it could leave the
56:04SPEAKERthe print house right and also i mean i assume there was also an aspect i mean i remember this
56:07SPEAKERback then of like the people that ran those companies granted you know at that time they
56:12SPEAKERwere people that had been around in a pre-internet era but they still had they attached a certain
56:15SPEAKERprestige to magazines specifically the thing we always heard was you know if you get the top slot
56:22SPEAKERon game spot you're there for 24 hours tops yeah if you get a magazine cover you are on newsstands
56:27SPEAKERin airports for a month straight and like those are business executives walking through airports
56:31SPEAKERa lot and seeing their product on the cover of a magazine over and over on a newsstand is like
56:36SPEAKERa big warm fuzzy for them like they're definitely i remember going to like i remember going to
56:43SPEAKERhardware oems and seeing framed covers or blow ups even covers totally in offices and conference
56:49SPEAKERrooms and stuff so people were stoked about that yeah yeah for sure it's it's nice to hear this
56:53SPEAKERslightly more realistic breakdown of what the like ups and downs and challenges of working in
56:57SPEAKERprint were because like my perspective on it based on what the information i was getting was that it
57:03SPEAKERjust sounded like you know party time all the time well and and like i know our trade show experience
57:08SPEAKERhaving gone from covering print to covering online trade shows oh my god the trade show experience
57:13SPEAKERwas was dramatically different and that's probably where a lot of this comes from right it's like
57:17SPEAKERwell so so i mean real quick i'll summarize i know i've kind of talked about this before
57:22SPEAKERbut like i came up through the internet finding people on usenet and irc that it turned out worked
57:28SPEAKERin in gamespress right like i didn't know that at the time when i was talking to them there were
57:32SPEAKERjust people there to chat about import final fantasy games or whatever but like it turned out
57:37SPEAKERoh my god these people all work for game magazines holy shit like them talking to the people that are
57:41SPEAKERdoing their fames uh and the consistent impression i got from them about working on those magazines
57:47SPEAKERwas that it was very much three weeks of roll into the office at noon play some quake like play some
57:54SPEAKERof the review game you're playing and then go drink at five or what i'm i'm i am so that was
58:00SPEAKERmy perception of the game's press at future at the time okay like i was doing the hardware stuff at
58:04SPEAKERthree o'clock in the morning in the lab right so like so like i might be embellishing a little bit
58:08SPEAKERhere but that was very much like the the the the impression i got from talking to them while they
58:13SPEAKERwere living that life was it was like three weeks of that and then one like 90 hour week of oh my
58:19SPEAKERgod we have to make an entire magazine in a week because we haven't done shit i i look they were
58:24SPEAKERdefinitely magazines that ran that way they were definitely like next gen was a really tight run
58:28SPEAKERchip for the most part and they didn't do that they were they were close to us by the time i was
58:35SPEAKERby the so when future started everybody was in their 20s in the ui when imagine started in the
58:41SPEAKERus everybody was in their like late 20s or early 30s and the the alcohol consumption was legendary
58:48SPEAKERby the time i started yeah um and you know not to glorify that it wasn't good it wasn't healthy in
58:55SPEAKERa lot of ways but it was a bunch of like young dudes who were working in san francisco and like
59:02SPEAKERthey all everybody lived together you know nobody had girlfriends nobody had wives and like the one
59:09SPEAKERguy who was married would have everybody over for thanksgiving and it would turn into like sitting
59:14SPEAKERaround playing games on the couch and getting really really blotto and that was just what they
59:18SPEAKERdid every day after work too yeah yes so it was funny though i i randomly was just chatting with
59:24SPEAKERa friend who used to work in that space way back when and they actually said i had no idea about
59:30SPEAKERthis like they said there was actually you know we talked about the weird adversarial relationship
59:34SPEAKERbetween print and online it sounds like there was even some factionalism between different magazines
59:38SPEAKERbecause oh god yeah this person this person happened to work on one of those magazines
59:42SPEAKERlike you said where they spread the work out and actually like did it responsibly and like
59:46SPEAKERand you know got it done without killing themselves and like there was a perception
59:51SPEAKERfrom the other side of you know the other types of magazines that like oh well those guys aren't
59:56SPEAKERworking 15 hours a day during deadline what the fuck are they doing like look at these slackers
1:00:00SPEAKERgoing home at 6 p.m when they're on deadline what is this about like that stuff was straight up
1:00:05SPEAKERmanage middle management pitting the magazines against each other so people wouldn't talk about
1:00:08SPEAKERhow much they were getting paid i'd be so dirty that's so dirty it was anyway yeah so like the
1:00:13SPEAKERe3 thing that's the last thing i'll touch on before we go was like the e3 uh situation was
1:00:19SPEAKERthe ultimate manifestation of this divide yeah because yes i heard all i heard about their e3
1:00:24SPEAKERexperience was they would get you know they'd go to the show take the meetings they had see the games
1:00:31SPEAKERdo nothing with it because they can't run a magazine with e3 coverage for another month
1:00:36SPEAKERi had three pages for e3 every year okay i had three pages for comdex i had three pages for ces
1:00:42SPEAKERright and so they would see the stuff at the show leave the show at four or five and like go
1:00:46SPEAKERto parties all night and that was the entire trade show yeah and and we were running around taking
1:00:50SPEAKERmeetings all day running back to the booth writing stuff up in between meetings if you had 20 minutes
1:00:55SPEAKERto try to bang a story out and then staying up to like well into the am finishing all the other
1:01:00SPEAKERstuff we had to write like it was a a meat grinder well it's it's the difference between it's the
1:01:05SPEAKERdifference between like covering everything and covering the five most interesting things right
1:01:10SPEAKERtotally yeah and and covering five most interesting things is way easier than covering everything it
1:01:16SPEAKERturns out i the when we switched when we launched maximum pc.com in 2007 i think again and like norm
1:01:24SPEAKERand i were the online team at that point like i was running the magazine i was also running the
1:01:28SPEAKERwebsite and i hired norm to come in and be like the web guy and we went to e3 i had gotten an
1:01:35SPEAKERinterview with karmak the year that i think rage was coming out the of the rage year probably which
1:01:41SPEAKERi think was also the rock band year maybe a rock band two year you might be right now um and we
1:01:47SPEAKERwent to an interview we went to interview karmak in the theater where the rock band stuff was
1:01:53SPEAKERhappening so they were both ea and we were backstage and then the pr person was like hey
1:02:00SPEAKERdo you want to go the who's getting ready to play and i was like fuck yeah i want to go watch the
1:02:05SPEAKERwho play so we went i was norm was like we got to go transcribe this 45-minute karmak interview and
1:02:11SPEAKERi was like dude you're right but i want to go see the who he's like yeah i want to see the who too
1:02:14SPEAKERso we went saw the who and then the moment they left the stage we busted ass back to the hotel
1:02:20SPEAKERand like he took the back half of the recording i took the front half of the recording
1:02:25SPEAKERand we transcribed until like three o'clock in the morning and posted this karmak interview
1:02:29SPEAKERthat's fantastic i was like oh god these online people this is a horrible way to live we need like
1:02:33SPEAKER10 times as many people for this yeah so yeah i feel your pain man yeah yeah whatever i mean it
1:02:39SPEAKERwas it got me where i am i wouldn't trade it for anything yeah as bumpy as it was at times the grass
1:02:46SPEAKERis always greener and if you're ever in a position where like you have institutional hatred of
1:02:50SPEAKERsomebody else inside your organization or competitors maybe think about why people
1:02:54SPEAKERmight want that to happen that's probably coming from somewhere yeah that shit doesn't happen by
1:02:59SPEAKERaccident yo yeah like like they made us they they had built this relationship with ziff davis
1:03:06SPEAKERpeople that was entirely the entire goal of that was so that people didn't go work for fucking
1:03:12SPEAKERziff davis and make more probably make more money i don't know yeah anyway ziff davis was publishing
1:03:17SPEAKERpc mag and a bunch of other games books anyway it was a time it was it indeed it was a time
1:03:26SPEAKERspeaking of time this is the time in which we thank the patrons of our show yeah it's the best
1:03:32SPEAKERtime of the show yeah so if you would like to know how you can support the tech pod you can find out
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1:03:56SPEAKERas always thanks to all of our patrons but a special thanks go to
1:04:01SPEAKERour executive producer to your patrons the bunny fiend jacob chapel david allen and james kamek
1:04:05SPEAKERthank you all so much yeah in addition to the fabulous tech pod discord you can get access to
1:04:11SPEAKERour exclusive patron only episode uh where this month we talked we did like a potpourri episode
1:04:16SPEAKERkind of where we like ran down all of the things that we didn't have enough to do a full episode on
1:04:21SPEAKERof the real show of the regular show yeah like your busted water main my busted water main uh
1:04:28SPEAKERwe talked about uh i call him alan by the way the busted water man oh yes yes he's a he's a
1:04:32SPEAKERfamily friend yeah uh we talked about hitman adventures and how we learn hitman games stuff
1:04:38SPEAKERlike that how those levels work god they're so fucking cool it's pretty good they're pretty good
1:04:44SPEAKERyeah pretty good uh but that's it that's it for the month oh uh hey if anybody wants girl scout
1:04:49SPEAKERcookies my daughter's son girl scout cookies oh don't say that you can go to cookies.content.town
1:04:54SPEAKERand order serious yeah oh no uh and here look the cookies the cookie industry is part of the
1:05:01SPEAKERfabulous tech bot empire the content down empire i can't believe i'm looking at this right now oh
1:05:05SPEAKERno what is a trifoil what in the world it's shortbread it's it's the it's the girl scout
1:05:10SPEAKERshortbread cookie they're pretty good they melt in your mouth okay but just so you know we are a
1:05:15SPEAKERthere's two girl scout bakeries one makes caramel delights and peanut butter patties that one sucks
1:05:21SPEAKERthat's not what we are okay we're firmly in samoa slash uh tagalong territory over here
1:05:29SPEAKERi did they do s'mores now s'mores you know the secret of the s'mores you put in the microwave
1:05:34SPEAKERoven for five seconds and the marshmallow gets kind of melty and it's delicious no offense to
1:05:38SPEAKERyour child but i'm closing this window yeah no it's uh if you don't want to get cookies and you
1:05:43SPEAKERstill want to support the girl scouts then you can donate boxes to uh uh soldiers abroad they send
1:05:49SPEAKERthey send the girl scouts send care packages with cookies to people who are stationed overseas which
1:05:53SPEAKERi think is awesome that is a much more honorable and less destructive use of their money there you
1:05:58SPEAKERgo weird girl scout cookies are concerned uh so yeah uh patreon.com slash tech pod thank you all
1:06:04SPEAKERfor supporting the show we will be back next week
1:06:28SPEAKER[BLANK_AUDIO]