I’ve enumerated my personal struggles past usefulness elsewhere, suffice it to say that after what ended up amounting to a self-imposed exile from… well, from people, I guess… I have been looking for ways to alter my perspective and find my way to fit in and contribute to… the community of people. Saw a MyFaceTweet about a church needing someone to run their streaming on Sundays… and perhaps eventually evolve into a position that worked on their website and social media endeavors.

I tried not to get too excited, but wow, it sure sounded perfect. I’ve been participating in social media with jjewell.com and beyond since 1996… I’ve been doing sound and video for live performances since 2003… this was a reasonably small step back into the people-verse for me, less likely to overwhelm, but room to grow… and it’s a church I know that still contains friends and family, although I personally have not been a part of its activities for years. I followed up, made and returned calls, had a Zoom interview. It… really seemed like things were going pretty well.

The misunderstanding was this: it was always clear they had, ultimately, two positions in mind, which could possibly both be filled by one person… and that the first position of greatest need was the Sunday Service part of it: making sure everything ran correctly, and things got posted in a timely manner. Their website and other advancements were a secondary priority. Again, at first, this had seemed perfect for me: in looking for excuses to stretch my recording and editing muscles (not to mention possibly the performance muscles as well), I tried to focus on the things I could bring to the Sunday Service table. When the social media aspect of it came into play, I presented more long term thoughts… social media is by definition always in flux; clicks, impressions, and likes are poor measures of meaningful interaction; and discovering the ways different media speaks to different groups… so the opportunity is to use a beefier Sunday Service in different ways on different forms of social media to create more actual connections.

Despite my proven abilities to be a positive participant in the church’s Sunday Service (I was in the choir, I was a worship leader, I was a lay speaker: I sang from that loft, I spoke from that lectern, I preached from that pulpit), the position went to a person who possessed more Social Media cred than I did.

I misunderstood what they meant by focusing on the Sunday Service: I leaned towards ways to improve the Sunday Service in all its presentations, but all they wanted was a way to increase clicks on the Sunday Service presentation they already have. Or, at the very least, the clicks were a more important consideration than the source material when it came to filling this particular position, spending this particular money, bestowing this particular official sanction.

That paragraph keeps sounding harsher than I want it to; let me be clear that there is obviously a certain amount of speculation on my part in this section of our essay, further, I want to be clear that I am not attributing this to any individual or clique. I have no idea if the phone call I received earlier came from a person who disagreed with everything I presented in the interview process and/or who I am as a person and was showing me the door politely, or a guy who felt he was being forced to make a short-sighted decision by the hierarchy at hand and was trying to find a way to keep a door open.

Does that distinction actually represent a difference? In a short term way, no, absolutely not, for either party. The die is cast, they shall move on making the best of their decision and I must, too. Which summons the question, what is the best I can make of this decision?

Check out this video jjewell https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1240121263

I’m not in a good place. This is not necessarily a new or unfamiliar situation for me… but on a larger scale, I feel I am running out of alternative options to try in some areas of stagnation. Things I was depending on as a part of my future appear to be rather features of my past… and I find myself trying to get motivated to move in… some direction I can’t name or point to, anymore. I don’t see anywhere that my desires mesh with those of someone outside myself. I feel more alone than I have ever been… and it is those with whom I have the most invested that I have come to feel most alienated from.

The life evaluation system I’ve been developing places an important focus on the actions we take, the actual differences we make in the real world: the plans we move forward, the goals we achieve, the joy and meaning we find, all arise from our interactions with the world outside of us. It’s getting harder for me to see the world outside of me, which makes me more unsure of and less confident in my decisions, which leads to hesitancy and lack of motivation in action. I seem to have discovered the first epic flaw in this method: you have to have some idea where you are going in order to aim towards it.

There’s an aspect of development that has revealed itself through my system… I realize I have not done a good job of relating this concept yet, but getting it out here, now, in whatever crudeness of form might be positive. The tl;dr for prerequisites of this paragraph goes like this: A person must be judged based on an understanding of the three A’s: Aspirations, Actions, and Archive; we do not create our Aspirations, we develop them in response to our upbringing and environment; religion and politics are the two main factors contributing to our Aspirations; we all have a religion that arises when we understand and confront the reality that we are tiny and insignificant in an infinite and resolute universe and we must have an ideology concerning our place in that vastness; we all have a politics that arises when we understand an confront the reality that we are individuals in a composite universe, that there are as many other religions we must deal with as there are humans we encounter… and that we are issued, informed, and often indoctrinated in both a religion and a politics before we have developed to the point of recognizing and asking the underlying questions these institutions were created to address.

We got put on a team, we were taught the plays, we had the “bad guys” identified for us… before we knew the rules, or, really, even understood the ramifications of what we were agreeing to play.

Apologies if this all seems like rambling. It comes down to this for me, at this point: I have found myself, in the name of supporting a religion or a politics that I have been associated with as long as I can remember, on no more perceptible foundation than one might support a favorite sports team, supporting actions and/or ideas that clearly have no place within the recognized framework of that religion or politics.

In case this is hard to relate to, I’ll touch on a story I’ve mentioned before. As a member of a church with an aging-to-the-point-of-extinction congregation located across the street from an elementary school, it felt a little weird when the pastor decided that we should hold our Sunday service on the lawn in front of the church… and in front of that elementary school that, even on the weekend, attracted students and parents to the lovely and well-equipped campus. This… was not a theology-based decision. This was advertising, plain and simple. I clearly remember the family driving to the first “special outdoor” service… with no organ on the lawn, it was my guitar providing the musical aspect of worship, so we were cramped in the car with the PA equipment I was toting… and my younger son completely innocently asked why we were going to the trouble of having church outside, this summer. I perhaps had not realized the depth of my own reaction to the circumstances until I heard myself reply: “Because Jesus said ‘when you worship, you should yell LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME as loudly as you can.'”

I mean, we all “know” and “understand” what marketing means to business… but somewhere along the line a lot of people missed the fact that the question religion was supposed to answer does not concern popular acceptance or financial success. Religion is simply not a business, and it can’t possibly be… but American Capitalism requires that, if American Religion is to exist, it shall exist as a business.

And we wonder why religion seems to fuck up so many people’s brains. We are looking to it for the answer to a question… that is simply not addressed in the popular religions offered and consumed… which must be profitable businesses to even exist as an option.

But the thing that makes me so hopeless… the reality that ensures that my dreams will never take form outside my head… is that people do seem to understand, at some level, the importance of religion and politics, even if they seem willing to sacrifice a concept of WHAT is right for the comfort of WHO is right, and fighting under the flag of a popular leader rather than a learned or wizened or reasonable leader.

There are absolutely good-hearted, well-meaning, positively-intentioned people… that run roughshod over the heart and soul of their historical teachings… because it is currently popular, currently encouraged, currently SOP, in this dollar driven world… to do those things, to find a way to classify what Christ would have called “your brothers” as outsiders, infidels, and the enemy… so as to deny them rights, success, life, humanity.

How do you even talk to these people?

“Look, the things you are doing fly in the face of the things you are saying are important to you” has not worked, for me. There is a disconnect. “Can’t we look at ourselves objectively to be better,” has never once failed to elicit the response “if you don’t like it, go be the other guy.” Republicans hate me when I go this route. Democrats despise me when I take this tack. No one, absolutely no one in America, wants to look at themselves and ask “what can I do better,” there is only the Religious Political drive to win, to make our one opinion the correct one, and to punish anyone who failed to be born and raised in the ways we were.

Just so you know, I hate all of you, at this point. I mean, I hate myself, too, but at least I seem to be making some allowance that I am the on who could be wrong, that I might need to be the one to question my background, that I might have to change some revered learnings in order to Get Along With The World.

Seriously, I haven’t seen even one of you fuckers ask yourselves these questions. Moreover, I haven’t met a single one of you who will even acknowledge that this is a reasonable question to be considered. I have not voted Republican or Democrat for more than a decade, yet I have managed to alienate both my Republican and Democrat friends… merely by imagining myself one of them and asking how we make ourselves better.

No one seems to want to consider “how can I make myself better?” There’s a whole shitload of people saying “you have to treat me better,” or “you have to think better,” unilaterally, and using legislation and capital to try to enforce their Aspirations on others… everyone thinks the solution is too force everyone else to think like they do.

It’s broken. It’s hopeless. There is no one pursuing the goal of a politics that acknowledges and appreciates the infinity of religions represented by the human race… only the pursuit of destroying every other viewpoint, every other background, every other opinion, but your own… and only for the reason that it is the one you are familiar with, not through any study, comparison, or thoughtfulness.

I am ready to leave this existence because I feel totally alone in confronting the world and its inhabitants this way. I have found no aligned souls, no copacetic thought processes, with which to share this journey… and among those that this life has brought closest to me, friends, family, my spouse… I feel distinctly unwelcome and unwanted for the questions I consider.

Does anyone feel this? Is anyone else fighting this fight? Am I the only one… am I the crazy one, the wrong one… the one that needs to leave for the good for everyone else?

I still consider myself a Christian, but only to myself. I will no longer claim the label publicly. Not because I am embarrassed about who I am, but because I am appalled by the public behavior and policies being championed in the name of Christianity. I want no part of that, no connection to those aspects of modern American Christianity… I would flat out argue most of these behaviors and policies aren’t Christian in any way, and the clumsy semantic manipulations that pass for justifications for the label are as literal an interpretation of the snake in Eden as we are likely to discover.

So I don’t go ‘round advertising my Christianity right now… although I do still preach the gospel as I understand it with everything I say and do. Right now, preaching the gospel as I understand it; which includes helping the sick, clothing the poor, feeding the hungry, maintaining connections to the incarcerated or “cast out” of “regular” society; these things end up coming across as political arguments in our world, rather than the basic morally right religious tenets I hold them to be.

I have to come see this as natural and unavoidable, as much as we throw around separating church and state. Church comes from religion, from our need to understand our place in the grand scheme and to have a moral compass upon which to base our actions. The state comes from governments, people gathering to decide how to direct their actions as a group. One’s religion will always inform and direct one’s politics. Separating church and state cannot mean removing religious thought and attitudes from politics, but must mean removing state favoritism for one religion.

That seems obvious, doesn’t it? People have different backgrounds, educations, and worldviews, and different religions spring from that. Trying to limit some, or promote other, religions through political means simply guarantees denying some people their history, their culture, their sense of self. It is a recipe for constant disharmony and confrontation.

This is what we have made of religion, in America, of Christianity, in particular: a plan to continue to pit masses of the people against other masses of the people. Not that America deserves any credit for the concept, the history of religion is literally the history of dividing people based on their interpretations of the scripture, even to the point of what pieces, exactly, were “appropriately” scripture. Religion, for a concept so associated with peace and love, has a remarkable history of divisiveness and violence.

America, and the Republican Party in particular, does deserve citation for the level to which they have weaponized religion in the political arena. My reluctance to declare myself Christian has nothing to do with my actual religious beliefs, but is because declaring yourself a Christian in this space and time is declaring a lot more than your religious beliefs. Because of the deep seated connection between Christian American voters and the Republican Party’s platform, coming out as a Christian necessitates being in favor of authoritarianism. Calling yourself a Christian means you can and will ignore reality around you. Standing with the Christians is standing on the premise of whose sins are to be forgiven and whose are to be punished is a properly human decision.

I know a lot of Christians, and many of them would argue with those assessments of what Christianity means for them, which is fine and, in some cases, even demonstrated in their historical behavior. But I think it shows at best an alarming naïveté, and at worst silent approval, of the demonstrated policies and actions of churches and religious leaders… and political leaders that use religion to maintain a divided populace.

I have noticed something darkly humorous in our political/social current events. There are a lot of “reasonable” people pointing how how Trump’s policies have hurt the response to COVID-19… typically in conjunction with some appeal for support for the Democratic Party. Now, certainly, I absolutely believe that Donald Trump put Jared Kushner in charge of the coronavirus response team for the trinity of purposes of funneling supplies to Trump supporters, denying supplies to Trump detractors, and ensuring as much of any resulting business as possible flows through Trump related conglomerates. And yes, that’s awful and no, I don’t believe any Democrats would manipulate the system this blatantly.

But this predictable Trumpian chicanery is not the root problem of our collective crisis response. The root problem is an American health system designed for creating profit and not health results. The irony that these folks are promoting the Democrats as the answer to health service issues so soon after the DNC colluded to end Bernie Sanders, the only Democrat who actually campaigned on the promise of changing the for-profit health system, is not as lost on me as it seems to have been on them.

This irony is a symptom of the Democratic Party as a whole right now. The party has shifted right over the years. Few would try to refute that, but I think even fewer would admit to how far it has gone. Barack Obama once admitted in normal times, he would be considered a moderate Republican. Both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren were literal Reagan Republicans in the day. Biden’s policies will be more of the same Clintonomic retro-neoconservatism that directly led to Trump’s revolution, a revolution that the Reagan Republicans set the table for in the first place.

We are following the wrong carrots… it is not panic that has us running in circles, that path is simply where our chosen carrots continue to lead us. I wonder how much people see this… how much they look for patterns like this. I wonder if that Democrat I knew back in the eighties realizes that now she is standing for the policies and tendencies she fought against when she was young… wonder if she realizes she’s changed and chalked it up to “maturity,” or if “the Democrats” will just always be the white hats in her cowboy story, no matter if they are using the methods and means of the black hats and bandanas… to the same ends, ultimately.

So rebirth. Easter. Rolling away the stone and stepping into the light of God. How do we do that? How do I that? The institutions to which we turn for support and direction are compromised. Jesus would never get around to any miracles, he’d be so busy turning over tables.

He’d have to find a place without those tables to settle down to work. That’s how I do this, that’s how we do this. The light I’m stepping into is a new church. Easter 2020 is the start.

Discuss this post on the jjewell discussion boards. 

As has been documented elsewhere, I’ve been going through my old machines to see what’s working and what isn’t. A parallel interest of mine  is retrogaming and emulation, and while I’ve been peeking through old hardware, I’ve been poking around new software and emulating some of the things I’ve been doing on the real things.

As far as STs go, I’ve been working with Hatari for emulation. It comes with EmuTOS, a reverse engineered publicly distributable version of Atari’s TOS operating system for the STs, TTs, and Falcons, and the ability to emulate different configurations of hardware. So the fun for me has been recreating some of my actual hardware setups in Hatari. I got it displaying the way I wanted, then starting playing with the hardware emulation configuration to recreate my original 520ST as I actually used it, upgraded to 2.5 megs of memory. I found images of the actual Atari TOS ROMs, and starting running TOS 1.04 rather than EmuTOS. As of today, I got one type of hard drive emulation running, and Hatari is reading a folder of my Mac SSD as its C-drive. As I was wandering around the house with the computer, I realized that in some ways, I finally had my STacy.

I am refining my process.

As I rediscovered my Ataris, I first went through the ST/TT/Falcon series, plugging things in and seeing what worked, getting what data about them that I knew was interesting and that I knew how to get easily. As I went through the 8-bits, I went a little deeper on each machine as I had it out, and figured out more things that were important and more ways to find out things. I’ve got jjATR HC summaries posted for the VCS and the XL series, and  summary for the XE series is in process. The 800 summary will be last for various reasons.

Now I’m going to make a second pass through the ST/TT/Falcons, and I’m trying to get ahead of the game by planning my summaries and scouting for what information I may want and how to get it.

The 8-bits dropped themselves into categories fairly easily along VCS/800/XL/XE lines. By that token, ST/TT/Falcon seems like the logical summaries, but there’s the complication of the Megas and the ST varietals, in particular the STe. I haven’t decided yet whether to group based on on the physical architecture (ST/Mega/TT/Falcon) or hardware capabilities (ST/STe/TT/Falcon). I do think I want to avoid the ST/Mega/STe/Mega STe/TT/Falcon over-encumbered solution. And if it’s physical architecture, then the STf, STm, and STfm models would rate their own summaries. I think I’ve just convinced myself.

I also looked ahead at the web to see what kind of info I might like to gather, and I’m glad I did because it turns out, for instance, that on the Falcon series, the serial number possibly never matches from the case to the motherboard. And because these machines tend to have lived with so many techie tinkerers over the years, there’s no guarantee that the case serial has even a passing resemblance to the “real” serial number on the running motherboard. So I’m going to be opening all of them along the way.

I already have my original 520STfm, stuffed with 2.5 megs by my own hands, running in the bedroom office, and the TT030 running in the music workstation. The first machine I’m looking at in depth is a 1040STe with 4 megs on board.

I mentioned that fact that this machine had 4 megs on board, and my time with the XLs has me attuned to quirks in these labels… the first thing that jumps out at me is the 4160STE in the FCC ID… perhaps this ST came with 4 megs installed from the factory? Quick Googling doesn’t immediately confirm this suspicion, but does tend to lend it some authenticity.

I picked this machine to be up next for a couple of reasons… first, as a 4meg STe in the old school form factor, it’s a prime choice to be my workhorse ST system. Second, although it currently has TOS 1.06, I do have a set of 1.62 ROMs I wanted to put in. Finally, I wanted to see what was up inside, because after booting several times to get info and test screen resolutions, it started three-bombing on me just as I was getting ready to pack it up. That indicates a bus error, so I was thinking I knocked something loose on the floppy drive. Now, though, it’s coming right up, again. Mojo electronics.

Related models

Mega STe – My poor Mega STe, the STe with the heart of a Mega and the body of a TT, has a missing F10 key on the keyboard.

Here’s a readable version of that SysInfo screen.

20190627: This is a very pretty looking and mechanically sound feeling Atari XL. Runs, boots from floppy. Has Expansion Port Cover. Small hole drilled in the back panel of the case. I vaguely remember this coming from an active hardware hacker who removed an upgrade switch to reuse in another machine… maybe a socket for something already installed in here? Keyboard feels amazing… maybe an upgrade there?

Wow, let’s get a better look at that power supply.

I’ve always thought these were great power supplies. I need to go back and see if I can find a page I used to know that compared the different types of Atari power supplies… apparently, some of them are easy to open up and work on, but some of them are epoxy globs on the inside. This is one of two like this I’ve ever come across.

So back to the main event…

The 83A indicates location of manufacture as the Atari-Wong plant in Hong Kong; HA is the code for NTSC 800XL machines. The three digit stamped code is a date code, here indicating week nineteen of 1984 as the manufacture date.

It turns out that the nice keyboard wasn’t an upgrade, just a solid piece of kit from the get-go. Further spelunking into keyboard variations reveals this keyboard to be the Alps switch-based model, generally liked for both its feel and its repairability.

This upper case is marked C024583-001 CAV. A REV. 2

Lower case stamped C024584-001 CAV. A REV. 1.

What we can see before removing the shielding. The little bit of information in the top right only appears in the XL motherboard list twice, either it’s Rev C APC Hong Kong or Rev D OPC.

This 800XL is in amazing shape, he mentions as he realizes how clearly you can see him taking that photo in the reflection off the shielding. There’s also a visible number stamped on there, C 024652-001R C. Google shrugs its shoulders at that particular reference.

Related models

The Atari 600XL is the little brother to the 800XL, literally.

That is actually a second of the cool looking power supplies, they both work!

Here again we see the 83A prefix for the Atari-Wong manufacturing plant, and the code for the NTSC 600XLs was EA. Fifteenth week of 1984. This machine apparently went out of the same plant about a month before the reference 800XL above. The keyboard externally appears to be a Stackpole bubble type.

Additional machines

jjATR 256XL, runs. Mojo switch on back panel.

Made in Taiwan, 72R prefix, HA for NTSC 800XL, 52nd week of 1984. Appears to have Stackpole keyboard.

jjATR 800XL-b, runs, no response from SIO.

Made in Taiwan, 72R prefix. Expected HA, 39th week of 1984.

20190705 – Opened this machine up. Learned a little something about keyboards.

This unit has the same keyboard as the reference 800XL above, the Alps socketed switch model. There is at least one switch version from AWC, then two Stackpole keyboards and one from Mitsumi.

Here you can see the Alps logo and various part numberings on the keyboard.

Turns out there was also a motherboard in there to learn about.

A post on the AtariAge forums has a list of the known motherboard types, which I’ve reproduced here.

Board Name Fits PN Revision Date Component Side Solder Side Manufacturer

800XL 800XL CO61851 A1 Chelco 1983 P/N: 150800011 REV A1 800XL 800XL/CO61851 A1 CHELCO

800XL 800XL CO61851 A2 Chelco 1983 P/N: 150800011 REV A2 800XL 800XL/CO61851 A2 CHELCO

800XL 800XL CO61851 C CAO24808-001 REVA CA061854 800XL/CO61851 REV C/MADE IN HONGKONG APC

800XL 800XL CO61851 D 3284 CA06220-REV? PBT 374 800XL/CO61851 REV D/OPC/1298A/32-84 OPC

800XL 800XL CO61851 D 3384 CA061854 REV.D PBT 414 800XL/CO61851 REV D/OPC/1298A/33-84 OPC

800XL 800XL CO61851 D CAO24808 REV D PBT 504

800XL-SECAM 800XL CO24968-001 X1A 4-84 CA025926-001 REV- GCI-A 18-84 CO24968-001 REV-X1A 800XL-SECAM

800XL-SECAM 800XL C024968-001 R3 884 800XL-SECAM ROSE CAO24969-001 REV- 8-84 GX-211 VO C024968-001 REV R3 800XL-SECAM

800XLF 800XL CO25925-001 R1 © 4-84 CA025926-001 REV- CO25925-001 REV-R1 800XLF KT201 8502

800XLF 800XL CO25925-001 R3 285 © 9-84 CA025926-001 REV- CO25925-001 REV-R3 800XLF KT201 8502

130XE 800XL 5084 © 11-84 CAOXXXXX-XXX REV- 50-84/COXXXXX-XXX REV-R1 130XE

There are two stickers on this motherboard, a green circular one that possibly says ICT Passed, and an orange one that definitely says Burn-In Passed. I’m beginning to think these stickers might be obscuring the main identification I’m supposed to be seeing on this side of the board. But it is clear that the board is fully socketed, which is nice.

The back of the board clearly marks it as a REV A2. But there’s some parts of identification that still aren’t clear to me. Upon further spelunking, I am confident in calling this a Chelco Rev A2 board.

Here’s a look up under the shielding…

Part number C024651 REV. B. Contrast with reference jjATR 800XL info above.

Here are the parts of the case dismantled for cleaning.

The upper case is stamped C024583-001 CAV. B REV. 2, and the lower case is stamped C024584-001 CAV. B REV. 1.

jjATR 600XL-b, runs.

So… made in Hong Kong, but with a 7YJ code, so, a different manufacturing facility? EA for NTSC 600XL, 49th week of 1983. Would appear to be the oldest 600XL/800XL series machine I own, also the only black serial number label model.

The 7YJ prefix seems to appear in the FCC IDs for some 410s, 1010s, 600XLs and 800XLs. Atari worked with Chelco for boards, and Chelco manufactured tape drives… we also have seen a few Chelco 600XLs and 800XLs, machines that have Chelco stamped on the motherboards rather than Atari. I wasn’t going to start opening up machines for awhile, yet, but now I’m all intrigued…

Judging from the keycaps, this unit had a Stackpole keyboard.

Discussion thread for this post in the jjewell forums

20190626: So, for the 42nd year in a row, my original Atari VCS can officially be classified as “runs.”

I feel really lucky to have been in on this from the beginning… and to have it last so long and still work so well. This is a “Sunnyvale” VCS, or a “heavy sixer,” if you prefer: one of the first batch of Ataris that were manufactured in the Sunnyvale, California facility, had six switches across the upper front panel, and had a thick, heavy plastic shielded case. When manufacturing moved to Hong Kong in 1979, the body had a much lighter plastic case and shield with the six switches, hence, “light sixer.”

As best as I can ascertain, the Atari serial number system is pretty straightforward: run off a hundred thousand units, increment the letter, start over. One trick seems to be that Atari apparently started the VCS numbering somewhere in the E run, which coincides with the last production units of the Atari Pong game at the same facility. This speculation is supported by the fact that we haven’t yet found any VCS units with a serial number ending in A-D. The earliest serial number we know for sure exists on a VCS is #56910E, according to the most current list at AtariAge.

If we assume numbering started at ~#50000 E, my serial number would be about the 500,000th unit produced. Most estimates I see have Atari selling less than 500,000 units in 1977, allowing for some play in serial number existence and distribution, I think we’re in the right ballpark.

Even though the machine is now ubiquitously known as the 2600, it was referred to the Video Computer System, or VCS, at the beginning.

Sure, some of us geeks knew the actual Atari part number was CX-2600, as seen on the serial number label, but up until the 1982 introduction of the 5200 Super System, the on-product labelling was Video Computer System. The all-black, four-switch “Darth Vader” model introduced to accompany the 5200 was the first model to highlight 2600.

Discussion thread for this post on the jjewell forums

It’s like I keep trying to tell my kids, “You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want.” As I’m rebuilding my website to better reflect and serve my life, I’ve realized that some boundaries and expectations are in order.

The Roles of jjewell.com

In my personal life, I have tried to use some of Stephen Covey’s methods to be and do more. One of the main ideas I pull from Covey is that of Roles: we each play a certain number of roles in our life, and there must be a balance among and between them when it comes to our attention and effort. In that same way, I am expecting jjewell.com to serve several roles for me.

Information Repository – I want to be able to easily store and access all types of information and data that is important to me.

Connection Interface – I want to be able to easily share and enable collaboration on all types of creative projects that are important to me.

Neocapitalism – I want to be able to easily buy, sell, and trade my own goods and services in ways that avoid pitfalls associated with modern capitalism.

Information Repository

At one point, jjewell.com featured a MediaWiki installation focused on my life. I started making entries about certain events or topics of interest, with the intention that slowly but surely, everything I ever knew and loved would be connected and accessible through my website.

The wiki is not an aspect of jjewell.com that has been revived, at least as of yet. With that wide open a mission, there were just way too many rabbit holes to start down. These are the rabbit holes that I need to block off before we spelunk that cave, again.

I do have some idea of things I definitely want to have curated here. Most importantly, I want to create a repository for personal media: the photos, recordings, videos, documents, and other digital bric-a-brac I want to hold onto for personal reasons. I want to be able to add to and access the data wherever I am at the moment, and I want the access and backup options to be under my control.

I also want a repository for a more public type of media… things I want to curate for use beyond my own brain. In my case, this kind of media includes songs to practice and perform; recording tools and data; emulation tools and data; and comic books, art, and animation. These are things that I want to have access to for myself, but that would also be useful and of interest to others. Again, I want to be able to get to the files from anywhere and control access and backup.

Connection Interface

A sometimes overlooked aspect of our technological present is our ability to communicate, work, and play with people separated by distance. I am a musician, a writer, a collector, and a cook, among other roles, and all of those roles benefit from collaboration with others. I want my website to to an enabler of this collaboration.

Neocapitalism

Some history: I came of age during the 1980’s in America, a time when making money seemed easy, desirable, and honorable in and of its own right. Even at that stage, it seemed to me that “business” was being used as code for, and rationalization of, selfish greed and a lack of human morals and empathy. I equated the words “sales” and “marketing” with “lying long enough for the check to clear.” My work history is filled with 1 to 5 year stints where I systematically lost faith in the good intentions and nature of every employer I ever had. Early versions of jjewell.com featured a Capitalism Capitulation page… where I acknowledged the need to involve yourself in capitalism to some extent in order to simply survive.

I’ve decided that almost all of that is the wrong attitude. Despite the glaringly audacious greed of the owning class and the systematic destruction of the working class as featured in Modern American Capitalism, the concepts of using capitalism as a basis for trade in organized societies are sound.

We aren’t going to replace capitalism. But we do have to fix what is broken about it.

And that’s what I mean by neocapitalism: doing business the most “fixed” way possible can in what is undoubtedly a broken system.

Moving Forward

I will be building the website with those basic expectations in place. I know that a personal photo library with automated backups will be a part of the plan. The restructuring I’m doing of my physical environment has meant that my vintage hardware, particularly Atari computers and games, has taken a primary spot in my focus.

Perhaps most importantly, as I uncover artifacts in my garage and life, I’m going to create a model of both the boundaries and the expectations of jjewell.com in the structure of the website itself.

Discussion thread for this post on the jjewell forums

I started feeling the discomfort with comics… and it actually happened years ago. Collecting comics had been the great passion in my life for decades, but a change in my financial situation first left no budget to collect, and eventually led to a massive liquidation of the heart of my collection. Complete runs of Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-man, The Uncanny X-Men, The Avengers, basically every Marvel Silver Age first appearance and key issue… it was necessary at the time, but the experience took a toll on my love of collecting comics. Although I hear the call of old comics, the thought of starting over on a collection just isn’t appealing. I did miss a lot of the stories and characters, though.

A few years ago, I discovered a thing called Marvel Unlimited. Long story short, for a pretty reasonable yearly subscription, I get access to thousands of issues of Marvel history… even through my iPhone, wherever I am. I like this service. I get to re-read all my favorite stories whenever I want, and even try a lot of new-to-me comics that I wouldn’t have gotten interested in, back when reading the story meant tracking down back issues in comic stores and conventions scattered across this great land of ours. In many ways, technology has left the physical comic book behind; paper comics aren’t well-suited to modern methods of distribution and consumption. Comic books are still what they always were, but the essence of the stories and characters are traveling so much faster and more widely through digital means. The books weren’t able to keep up with things changing around them… almost like an anterograde amnesia, comic books couldn’t process or adapt to the inevitable future.

But there was another part to my comic collecting. Yes, I liked reading the stories and spending time with the characters, but in the days before instant global full-video communication, there was much more of a thrill of the chase to it. I finally found my last Fantastic Four, issue #15, when I was set up at a small local convention, and a guest was looking to sell this and some other books, and another dealer who knew I was looking for it pointed me out to the guy. I had been looking for it for years… it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it, I didn’t have the book in my collection because I had simply never come across one in all that time of looking. That was part of comic collecting, and comic dealing, knowing about who wants what and making connections. Knowing your business. You can now buy and sell pre-graded, plastic-sealed comics that you can never actually touch or open, without leaving your chair. Completing a collection is less about archeological detective work, and more about having a credit card without a limit. Modern comic collecting, actually buying old comic books, has become less about knowing the comics than about picking the right lottery ticket. In our zeal to make the transfer and sale of comics easier and faster, we lost a certain amount of institutional knowledge: collectors at the highest levels are often investors or speculators in a stock, and not necessarily a fan, advocate, or expert on the actual comics. The modern methods of both casual consumption and high-end collecting have forgotten important aspects of their history… they suffer from retrograde amnesia.

All that had been floating around in my head for awhile, and I’d thought about it in different directions trying to make sense of it; trying to figure out the essence of what drew me to comic collecting. It was only more recently, as I’ve been curating various old computers, tvs, stereos, and music instruments, that I started thinking about tech in those same terms. For instance, I have paid for at least five different copies of one of my favorite songs, Man Out of Time, by Elvis Costello: vinyl album, cassette tape, CD, and digital download. At several junctures, I realized that I was paying for something I already “owned,” in principle: when I bought that first vinyl album, I bought the right to listen to that song as many times as I wanted for perpetuity; but I rationalized the purchase as a fair trade of dollars to avoid the time, hassle, and expense of acquiring and operating the equipment necessary to do a quality conversion. The formats of their time had anterograde amnesia, and couldn’t continue to function with excellence as time and tech went on. The next greatest formats always had retrograde amnesia, and my tape player forgot about all the music my record player knew, as the CD would in turn forget about my institutional knowledge from the tape.

Everything came neatly together for me when I got to the computers. I got my first computer in 1981, an Atari 800… and I still have it and it still works. Everything about it is just as amazing to me as it was almost forty years ago: the games are still fun, the applications still perform their assigned functions… but that fun and those functions have not stood the test of time, were not adaptable enough to stay relevant, to keep up with the current and move ahead. Anterograde amnesia. I got my second computer in 1987, an Atari ST… and I still have it and it still works, too. That was an interesting time for me, because I “needed” to have two computers running: I depended on software on the 800 to do things in life, and that software would not run on the ST. The ST had retrograde amnesia, and forgot the institutional knowledge that came before it. I had to buy new programs for the ST to serve the same function… often enough  called the same title and written by the company or individual who wrote the one for the 800.

Computers are particularly gifted at battling retrograde amnesia. The ST wasn’t too old before a clever programmer wrote a program that could pretend it was an 800. You could actually run those old programs written for different hardware on this newer machine through this emulation program. By overcoming the amnesia, the ST gained the 800’s institutional knowledge.

Emulators are now a part of our everyday lives; computer evolution favors those who are able to retain or regain that institutional knowledge. One of my favorite emulators makes my MacBook Pro think it’s an Atari 800. It’s amazing to be able to play the best games of my youth here on my regular computer anytime. But I still have an 800 (several from the line, in fact) and I still use it sometimes. Emulators are cool… but there are differences in the way a wireless PS4 joystick interacts with an emulator than the way an old-school 9-pin joystick interacts with an 800, not to mention the differences in the way a modern computer interacts with its monitor compared to the way old computers interacted with analog tv sets. Long story short, although the emulators are amazing, there is something tangible lost in the translation.

I like to think that I am becoming more self-aware; that I am considering my tendencies and motives to improve in every way I can. So when something like this spends so much time in my headspace, I try to figure out the lesson. There’s a primary layer to this, which reflects a certain bitterness about things that were once important to you losing their meaning: perhaps my best songs includes the line “Your passions turn to clutter there in front of your eyes;” I’ve felt this disconnect between what I thought I was and who I actually am for some time. I’m realizing how relatable the amnesias are to this thought: it’s not so much that I’ve lost interest in an activity, it’s that some kind of amnesia has gotten in the way of my connecting to my past, or in the way of learning more capabilities for the future… and that frustration, that miss, that lack of connection… is what leads to the activity becoming less important to me.

So I’m going to try to be more like a computer. I am going to confront my retrograde amnesia, and build whatever emulators I need to process the value of my past. I am going to expect my anterograde amnesia, and remain open to whatever adapters I can use to process new value the future offers.

Discussion thread for this post on the jjewell forums