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136 lines
7.2 KiB
HTML
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<TITLE>T E X T F I L E S</TITLE>
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<B>AN APPRECIATION OF COUNT LAZLO HOLLIFELD NIBBLE /\/oo\/\</B>
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<P>
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It's too easy in life to forget the people who helped make you what you
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are, who inspired you and gave you the early lessons you took to heart.
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Sometimes, what they have to teach you is so basic to your personality
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that you don't even recognize that they come from somewhere else besides
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you.
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<P>
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I've got a number of people like that in my past, and every once in a
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while, if I'm lucky, a memory comes back to the surface about that person
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that takes me back to those formative years. Today, that memory is of
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Count Nibble.
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<P>
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By the early 1980's, I'd already found my calling: collecting textfiles on
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BBSes. I was throwing them to floppies as fast as I could, logging onto a
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board and not stopping until I had entirely leeched their G-File or Text
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sections clean of everything I'd not seen before. If the site required
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validation, that was fine; I marked them down, entered what I needed to, and
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got back on the next day, validated, and sucked them clean. I was a kid
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with a mission, barely into my teens, thinking he could make a name for
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himself with a collection.
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<P>
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But after a while, you can get discouraged
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by <A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/apple/zorroplaying.txt">file</A> after
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<A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/apple/aecomman.app">bland file</A>, all
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written like they were notes to themselves and left on the BBS by mistake.
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I grabbed all these files out of a sense of duty to my collecting, but I
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would barely read them as they went by. My own writing style wasn't so
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hot either, and I was producing the typical kind of
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<A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/messages/letter.txt">sub-par writing</A>
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one might expect from a clueless suburban kid. But I knew quality when it
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went by: those 80-column, upper/lowercase writings, long, well-thought out,
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almost as if they were "professional" in a pile of amateurish jotted notes.
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<P>
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I forget where it first happened, probably on an Ascii Express (AE) Line
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that had a bunch of files on it, but I came into contact with the work of
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Count Nibble, and everything changed.
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<P>
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He was certainly memorable with his unique signature, an ASCII bat that
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stared at you after his name:
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<P><B>/\/oo\/\</B>
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<P>But beyond this piece of cleverness stood a white-hot light of talent
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that blinded me to the other works appearing on the boards.
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<P>
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Here was a guy who could not only write, but who organized his text and
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thoughts with a practiced, steady hand. While in the adult world one might
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have access to high-quality text all the time, this was a huge rarity in
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the teenage-weighted places I found myself online. It was like a breath of
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fresh air when you didn't even realize how choking the room had become.
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The 80-column screen wasn't empty to Nibble; it was a
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<A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/MISCHIEF/mrshim.txt">canvas he
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painted his words onto</A>, taking advantage of the unique properties of
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ASCII and ensuring that all things were in their rightful place. It wasn't
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just about throwing in lines and ASCII artwork to jazz up the piece; he
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<A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/food/newcoke.txt">used space and breaks</A>
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to organize his thoughts so that it all seemed that much more important.
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Capitals became headers, dashes became breaks, and when you got to the
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bottom of the text you felt you'd learned something, not just subjected
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to someone's lame opinion for 3 paragraphs.
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<P>
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He produced the Countlegger Series, a collection of textfiles written by
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others, meaning he was also a collector. But where I was happy enough to just
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have all these files, he would create these
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<A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/phreak/countleg.phk">compilations</A> that
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he would distribute on BBSes and AEs for others to download. I might have
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had eighty or ninety percent of these files in my collection, but the way he
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listed them in the contents made me excited anew for them; he showed me the
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treasure I didn't know I had.
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<P>
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He even took
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<A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/SCAMS/counterfeiting">files</A> by
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others that perhaps lacked spelling or clarity and fixed them up, not wiping
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out their names but simply adding his own, showing his own mark of quality.
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This was a moral lesson, of sorts, that he passed on to me; I never took
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someone else's work and threw my name on it just because I thought it would
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bring me glory. I might fix it up and credit my editing of the file, but this
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was to put my own name behind my work to make someone else's work clearer.
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Plagarism and theft seemed unfathomable after seeing Nibble's efforts.
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<P>
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Lazlo had his own BBS, the Terrapin Station in 505, which was itself mysterious
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and interesting to me; I had no knowledge of New Mexico whatsoever, and it
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was a rare BBS indeed coming out of the area code. This only added to his
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mystery. I only got on there a few times, but I made it a point of reading
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what I could. His Grateful Dead reference didn't rub off on me (and in fact
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went over my head, setting me up for a shock of recognition years later) but
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his attitude and approach to running his BBS sure did, and I know I ran
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my own BBS, The Works, in a similar fashion when I started it a year or two
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later.
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<P>
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If we ever talked at that time, it was probably furtive, a few minutes
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in a chat session on his board. But what would I have to say or offer? I
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was 15, just happy to be there in his work, enjoying the talent and care
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he put into his online persona. There were lots of people I hung out with
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and transferred files and went to parties with, but Nibble was there, in
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the background, in another distant place, a goal to live up to.
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<P>
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Ultimately, Nibble drifted away into the world of the Internet and Usenet long
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before I had a chance to, where he gained a name for himself making absolutely
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fantastic
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<A HREF="http://www.swcp.com/lazlo-bin/discogs">Discographies and mailing
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lists</A> for bands that I, independently, had come to like very much.
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Gone from BBSes and moved on, he found a new home and expressed himself
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just as wonderfully there.
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<P>
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Like most stories, this could have ended with these memories, but a number
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of years ago I was searching for his name and happily stumbled upon
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<A HREF="http://www.studio-nibble.com/">Count Nibble's Homepage</A>. With
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all the same talent he'd shown a decade and a half earlier, Lazlo Nibble
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now provided
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<A HREF="http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/ego.html">the history about
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himself I had never known</A>, a
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<A HREF="http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/swpg/index.html">retrospective
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of his Apple II days</A>
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and best of all,
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<A HREF="http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/writing/index.html#swpg">the
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files he'd written back then</A>. Some he'd even gotten from
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textfiles.com! As an added bonus, he even explained
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<A HREF="http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/images/lazname.gif">the story
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of his name and why it kept changing</A>.
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<P>
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Time had not dulled his talent, the world wide web had not diminished
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his efforts, and my own growing up had not fogged the perspective he'd
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bestowed upon me. Rare do mentors live up to such standards.
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<P>
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So thank you, Count Nibble. You helped make me what I am.
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<P>
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- Jason Scott<BR>
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December 9, 2002
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