Tomorrow, with your help, Zach Scott will destroy himself and conferencecall.biz

-SNIP-

i'm keeping the thread title, but i just _SNIPPED_ a very long, confusing post and thought i'd bring some of my doubts and questions here, instead, to see what you all think.

tl;dr i'm trying to sell conferencecall.biz. i'd like for it to go to someone who will take care of it and keep it as it is. i don't just want to give it away, though. i want to get a good price for it from some wealthy person or organization so that i can carry out my Chaotic Good plan as Zach TBD. the Zach Scott player character is getting retired. this is why it's tl;dr - there's a lot going on that i feel i need to explain. don't worry, it's generally not presented in Dungeons and Dragons terms.

i'm not sure where to begin. i guess with conferencecall.biz? it's been 7 years now, but it was made by a bunch of ilxors and me. here's the thread: https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=77&threadid=98997. (it's on 77, so if it doesn't load for you that's why). it's amazing for me to read through the first posts. i can see that i had a good fully formed idea of it right at the beginning. in the spirit of keeping it positive 2021, i'm proud of that! but immediately after that is what stands out: all the ilxors posting awesome ideas and offering to help and making it so much better, right at the beginning. i can still remember that feeling of putting the website together, having to quickly create a spreadsheet of all the awesome ideas because they were coming left and right, knowing that it would be good if i could just carry it through all the way.

but then, 7 years passed. and not just any 7 years. i go by Zach TBD these days. i thought i was going to make it official, but instead i'm ok with signing official paperwork as Zach Scott and doing everything else - art and life - as Zach TBD. sometimes the placeholder becomes permanent, and i live like that. i'm retiring the Zach Scott character. i think of him as going down swinging, in the end, but ultimately being overwhelmed by mindless hyper-religious orcs, like so many others. i like my new character much better, and i'm trying to do myself a solid by really giving everything 100% effort this time around, trying not to think or say negative things about myself constantly like i used to, and trying to live an ethical life. for me, that means trying to make enough money from my paintings and other projects (i'm planning a quarterly tape club) to cover my basic living expenses, living minimally to keep that cost as low as possible, and then giving anything beyond that to people who need it more than i do. i am lucky to have a partner that is extremely active in the chicago area mutual aid community, so i know where to give it directly in a way that will really make a difference. it may very well be a moot point - i don't need to hear from anyone that it's hard for artists to make money, thanks! i'm just saying, i think there is a mental well-being boost that you can get just by changing the overarching Goal of one's life, even if that goal is ultimately unobtainable. even if i don't hit my sustainable living goal, i will still be donating a portion of whatever i do make to B's mutual aid network. that's part of my sustainable living budget - it includes donations to groups like that as well as a (very small) amount toward buying other artists' work. if i'm asking other artists to buy my work, then i need to be able to buy theirs, so that's part of my minimal living cost. etc etc. TL;DR i am trying to be a good person, and for me that means living in a way that is internally consistent and ethical as i understand it.

part of cutting costs is ending subscriptions. i still pay about $12/month for conferencecall.biz hosting. i've spent like $1000 on the hosting for it, over the years. it's not that bad, but when i'm trying to cut costs, it does strike me that hey, maybe someone else can cover it, especially considering that i'm fine with it dying! i'm not pro-death, but i'm not anti, either. sometimes things need to die! and i would always have the underlying files, at any rate, as would anyone who wants to go copy the source code and assets at this very moment. if you read the source code it tells you exactly where they are. but i like the idea of killing off the main site as a way of thematically ending the conference call hell the participants have been locked in since Jan 2014, always repeating but never quite in the same way. i like the idea of giving it a 21-gun salute and then letting it die. also note that i make a little bit of that hosting money back by selling the domain to whatever piece of shit company wants it. Godaddy says conferencecall.biz is worth $1,099. probably not, but i could probably get something off of it, and I could use the money right now! (Also, wow thirtysecondstories.com, a good effort by others undermined by it being the first time i used video editing software in my life, lol, is supposedly worth $1,268 to someone?! maybe the whole Godaddy estimate thing is bullshit) and honestly i think it would be funny to go to conferencecall.biz and see it replaced with a clickbait website. it would be overwhelmed and buried by the current era, as with the Zach Scott player character.

but honestly, i want to see what the website is "worth", especially in light of all the recent stuff with NFTs. i guess it's not a good look to bring up a grudge with the digital art world as you're trying to sell digital art. but yes, i do believe conferencecall.biz is a superior work of art to anything Beeple has made, and it's insulting to see so much shitty computer art be commodified at such incredible values while i continue to pay my fucking hosting costs. or jeff's pickle, currently at $50. is conferencecall.biz worth more than jeff's NFT pickle? i don't exactly expect to make 60 million and all the other fools, but if my art is not even as valuable as what i could get from selling it off to a clickbait company, then i want to know that. all of that is not a good look, i know. but i'm ok with making a stand against that bullshit and making money off of conferencecall at the same time, if it prompts some well-intentioned "computer art buyer" - hypothetical, as i don't even know that digital art is a real community is any meaningful sense - to give me, and by extension, B's mutual aid network a bunch of money, i will take that. especially if they agree to keep hosting it in its original form. rich lefty art buyers, this is all people like me want from you: just take care of my stuff and give me money so i can help people. that's my message, sort of. not a good look i kn-

or maybe, in a more positive way of looking at this, it reaches new groups and organizations who didn't see it the first time around and might be interested in purchasing it for their collection, or for...something. i have no idea, what. again, me and the computer art world...are not on the same world. but maybe. i do think it's a good representation of 2013/14 computer art. it's GIFs + .mp3s for crying out loud, programmed lean and mean by allen so that it continues to efficiently work through the years (much like ilx). shit, i would want that in MY gallery or collection if i had one, but what do i know...

have i gone crazy? i hope it makes sense why i want to rid myself of it. i'm very proud of it and i'm not disowning it or anything, but at this point i think it's worth more to me in US dollars.

non-shameless plug: you can also help me by helping me find someone to buy this painting. i thought it was going to someone, but that person decided to offer me a (bigger) commission instead! so now i have this thing, which i wouldn't be able to afford myself. i understand. it's $800, and that's about the least expensive i can price it to pay myself a living wage for the time and materials spent on it.

http://zachtbd.xyz/images/twofriends.jpg

wealthy readers, please pass this on to people who can afford things like this! in the meantime, i'm going to start painting smaller things so they can be more affordable. i should be able to afford my own paintings, first, i think.

Zach I would like to acquire the work (and associated domain name and hosting responsibilities) from you please ilxmail me so we can discuss the price.

Conferencecall dot biz I mean

will do silby, I'll send it a moment.

if anyone else is also interested, or if you have leads on someone else who might be, you can ilxmail me or write to tbdzach at gmai1, i'll also follow up with an email to the original conferencecall participants (many of whom weren't ilxors). not to hurt your chances, silby, i just would like to see this do as well as it can. :D

send it IN a moment

hey karl malone (=calm alone? is that a pun i only just got?), i like yr painting

and good luck with everything btw, your whole plan sounds a+

hahaha, not calm alone, but i like that! i wish i could be calm alone!

and thank you! i'm glad the first two feedbacks i've gotten on this has been positive. i am not good at selling myself (i wish an anarchist lefty agent would represent me and take a cut of whatever) but it would be awesome to make an opening splash and dunk on zach scott in the process :D

thank you very much silby for your offer! what a tremendous boost, and it'll be so helpful to be able to push this a bit for the next few days with a strong opening offer!

but i am emailing george klooney right now

best of luck in this endeavor-- if a sale doesn't go through, would you consider donating it to archive.org or something? i think this deserves to be online forever

thanks diamonddave! don't worry, i will ensure that it goes to a good home

also, i am terrible at crafting brief, clear, sharable summaries of what i'm trying to do, but please RT this or rewrite it in your own words, either one is very helpful:

2) I am selling https://t.co/IpbI6ThK3c. I've already received a generous first offer, but would also love to see if an internet art or computer art-oriented org or gallery would want to purchase it for the collection. So please pass the word on. cool collectors only please.

— Zach TBD (@weinventyou) July 5, 2021

here, this is better:

As much as I want to own Zach’s seminal work of net art, like some sort of robber-baron, to do with as I please, you should absolutely bid against me. https://t.co/117IvC7zZ0

— Evan (@silby) July 5, 2021

every good bidding war starts with a challenge by the first bidder! hell yeah silby

can i give a huge fuck yeah to ilxor jaq, who just bought that painting up there? thank you so much. that plus the opening bids for conferencecall.biz mean i'm already doing very well for the month, way past my living costs. i'm still figuring out my exact model. i want it to be a formula and i'm thinking it incorporates both monthly goals as well as yearly. if i exceed my surplus for a month (currently shooting for ~$2.2-2.5k monthly living cost), then I want that to trigger giving, but I also want to put some of that surplus toward future months, up to a reasonable cap (maybe 12? or 6? most americans aren't able to live month-to-month, let alone 6-months to 6-months.) there might also be a year-end review type of setup. but whatever it is, today alone guarantees that i'll be giving thousands to mutual aid, either this month or at the end of the year. i think once i have a few sales of various things and can show it with hard numbers it will be more compelling

do you have other paintings for sale somewhere? i would love to take a look.

i have 3 more oil paintings for sale: they're all at zachtbd.xyz

I forget what price point i had for them, but the two 48x36" ones at were around $650-700, the smaller 24x18" one at $300-400 I think.

thank you! does your ilxmail work?

it does! i'm also at tbdzach at googlemail

all of this would be more clear if i would just finish my new website lol

haha i noticed a lot of /# links in there. i'll be in touch.

i should mention that i am VERY happy to do commissions. you can set a price and i'll tell you what dimensions it'll be. price would include supplies, labor and shipping, and in general, 100% of what go beyond standard pricing will go toward mutual aid (in addition to the portion of it that would go to mutual aid anyway, as well as well as times like now where i'e already hit my living wage for the month and the rest is going either toward future months or mutual aid, or both)

yeah, i put the website up overnight because i was applying to a residency. i was very drunk and did everything very quickly. i actually typed "it's all connected" in a statement and made a PDF and submitted it while simultaneously asking my two biggest inspirations (one my partner, 30, the other my studio splitter, nearly 40) to write me references. i feel awful about it. and i really need to make the links work sometime. but at least for now it's a facade of a working website with high res images of my most recent work

ok cool! we can maybe chat commission too.

I am also extremely up to any sort of experimental transaction. I have ideas of my own, and would love to hear others too! Like, if someone is reading this: what would YOU do? I am an actual person that will consider it

also why did i mention both of their ages? why did i do that? these are among the questions i intend to address in my life and work

for something especially good and someone especially experimental, i also have an idea that would mimic the blockchain but in real life, and would grant continuing money to anyone who bought it along the way. it would be hilarious, and i would build in a mechanism to fund mutual aid no matter what anyone else wants. always wanted to create a real helpful pyramid scheme, and if you've known me on ilx over the years you know exactly what i mean

find a wealthy person for me who can help me do it!

there are all these fuckers getting rich off of NFTs and buying yachts. is there a goddamn SINGLE one of them that will fund what i'm doing

rooting for jeff's pickle here

also: unconditional guarantee: if any of these fuckers have a better model than me, i will adopt it and tell people how good it is. i am searching for the best model. so before cryptonation destroys me, let them offer a better alternative

very drunk over here, watching spartacus

call 'em NFZ's

i posted a version of this on various channels, but i would love for an art critic to compare my work to bimple's. even if it's unfavorable to me. in fact, if they do that, i would LOVE to see it. but I think bimple just sold his works for $69M (and he continues to sell for millions, and is a mindless waste of space), and i think that conferencecall.biz is much better than anything he's ever made. no big deal, i don't expect to be paid millions, let alone thousands. but what does it say about this juncture in history if beeple is worth $69M and i am worth negative $1K, even though i'm openly saying all of my profits go to mutual aid? sorry to go to those lengths, but it's just fucking bullshit.

fuckng jeff's pickle is not only worth more than conferencecall.biz, but it's in the range of infinitude because his value is positive while mine is negative $1000. all while supposed institutional supporters of the digital art scene march on toward NFT/crypto bullshit like they weren't supporting it all the while

i would join anyone who pledged to BURY them

i am 99% joking 99% of the time, but be sure ^^that^^ is true. robin fucking hood

i am highly influenced by my top-volume headphone listening of SPARTACUS while working here tonight in Studio TBD

i honestly think my next painting is jeff's pickle, i will give it to jeff, and ask them to make as much money as possible on it by whatever means no matter who benefits

i would love to be murdered by a pickle yacht

let me have 1% of it so i can help people

I ended up letting my pickle go for $68. But I still have a baby pickle that hasn’t been revealed yet. Lower end pickle market is just above break even these days. And the banana market is even worse!

Thinking last night about how to NFT’ize cc.biz. Something like dreamloops where the audio elements of the conference call are programmatically generated, each of which would have corresponding rarity. e.g., am I on mute would be relatively common, but a toilet flushing in the back ground would be more rare. Do the same with the visuals.

Who knows if it would hit but it’s strange and unique enough that it may just work.

But it would need to be marketed, sent to influencers, discord started, etc. Which all seems exhausting.

Oh and deal with the annoying coiners that will complain about everything.

karl i always knew you were awesome but this is next level.

unfortunately my work computer is forbidding me from visiting your website. you must be on a blacklist of some kind?? but i will check it all out when i get home.

jeez, thanks tracer! zach, i'm kind amazed that zachtbd.xyz works on any computer! and no rush, I still need to put something else on it, it's currently a shell :)

Jeff you gotta HODL on that pickle! but it's nice that there is still hope in the form of a baby pickle.

i wish i were a more well-known artist, because i think it would be a great thing if someone NFT'd conferencecall.biz and then made more money off of it than i will. that would be amazing - kind of like how it's actually a good thing if you work at a corporation and your boss shoots you in the leg or non-fatally maims you. you lose, but ultimately you win. i highly encourage any direct comparisons between conferencecall.biz and NFT art, with frank discussion about the monetary value of each, as well as what i would do with $60M vs what Beeple would do with $60M, and why that actually does matter

I love you Zach! We should make some cool stuff ASAP.

Do you know any of the Rhizome people? IIRC, Dragan Espenschied runs their preservation group and you two have very similar vibes.

I've only been involved with Rhizome from an outsider/contractor perspective. for example, i was asked to make a bunch of GIFs for their Seven on Seven thing one year, and was paid through about a dozen subcontracts.

similarly, a little later Rhizome did a "GIF show" with Giphy. Rhizome provided hand-me-downs from 5 of their hot shit artists, while Giphy supplied the other 20, including me. i made this for it!

https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/zachscott.org/Assets/images/staircase/LoopDreams.gif

unfortunately it was placed right next to the bathroom, and all night lines formed in front of it and blocked the projection. i guess that was my fault for not thinking about lines and stuff like that. anyway, I was really hoping that someone from Rhizome would see it, because I got a lot of nice compliments that night (i acted like a complete maniac, as i have every other time i exhibit something, and i think i may wear an oversized helmet at my next one to prevent that), but if any of them were ever there, i never knew. it was a cool opportunity though i guess. it just sucked because the only people i knew to "network" with were the giphy people, and they were obviously more focused on what would become their BILLION DOLLAR ACQUISITION or whatever just a few years later.

i know Rhizome does lots of cool things. but they always do these net art retrospectives and i always try to get them to pay attention to me and they nevvvver do. also I recently started yelling at them about NFTs because they've been nodding along toward crypto for a long time now

they could make up for these petty grievances of mine via a large donation to mutual aid, lol

i'm going to try a new writing style real quick. brief!

Do you know any of the Rhizome people?

no, i do not

maybe kai ryssdal will buy it, did you @ him?

hahaha, I haven't gotten to his part of the story yet but it's coming

if I can get Kai Ryssdal to donate to mutual aid i will consider my work done here

a hoy hoy i got your message! you probably saw my reply already :)

alright, it's over! Silby, thank you so much. :) i'm heading into studio TBD now for real, but we should chat soon about details and logistics!

also if you take it and burn it down, i will respect that in a way you may not understand

I'm really glad it's going to an ilx0r, to be honest. I've said it before but it's one of my favourite projects, it was realised so well and I was so happy to be a small part of it.

Please sticky a "brought to you by Yogurtland" banner in the bottom right corner and insert an audio squarespace ad read every 20s.

i feel guilty making so many jokes about litigating and suing people for using it and all sorts of things. i swear that was all part of another plan that involved more of a pronounced fake "battle" between Zach Scott and Zach TBD at the moment that Z_S was about to truly destroy conferencecall.biz.

i actually think that whole approach would have been amazing AND that no one would have ever figured out what i was trying to do. so probably a very good thing for silby to get in there earlier with a serious bid. sometimes a good friend saves you from yourself. :)

out of interest KM, just how large is the website i.e. in webspace requirements, and what sort of traffic does it generate

Cosign emil.y's sentiments above entirely, am proud to have made the cut in a small way :)

thank you emil.y and maresn3st!

mark e, i'll get you some vital stats, one sec

traffic these days (post-2014) fluctuates between two states. normally, very little traffic. 20-30 people a day.

this is the daily traffic for the year of 2020. You can see that on Jan 20, 2020, something happened. every once in a while it will either get a small mention in some media outlet and that drives traffic for a bit, or someone on facebook will post about it and it revives. not sure what happened that day!

https://i.imgur.com/V8cedkt.png

here's another fun one. 2018:

https://i.imgur.com/JBtVCz5.png

what happened in late august 2018 to suddenly cause all that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17850902

after the first wave of one-time, weird-ass things when it first came out in jan 2014 - slate and marketplace especially - that's how it has been. it settles into a rhythm of 20-30 people a day (used to be more like 50-100, back in 2015), and then every once in a while someone like the stack overflow guy will find it and tweet about it and it's off to the races for 4 hours.

ok, now let me take a look at the size of the assets

lol, i just remembered that for a long time i was getting steady traffic from Russia, and finally realized it was because it made the front page of Esquire Russia for weeks in a row! there was no write-up or info about it, only this, at the bottom:

https://i.imgur.com/rmAM3do.jpg

"Useless site"

all fascinating stuff, ta.
reason i ask, is i was wondering re hosting and the levels of service are needed to run such a site.

Oh my god, I remember "useless site". Hilarious.

i've always done it through AWS. all of the GIFs and MP3s come out to 29.4MB total, which is kind of wild.

there are 79 mp3s, all of which are less 500kb. the biggest is the background music loop, which is 1.0MB.

i remember that originally there were, purposefully, 77 audio clips. but then i talked to kai and was trying to make him be my friend and he contributed 2 additional audio clips, bringing the total to an unhappy 79.

for the images, there are 29 GIFs. somehow, they're all under 150kb, and most are under 100kb. lean and mean!

at the time it was made i think i was still in aftershock from the infamous Tumblr filesize limit on GIFs. for a long time, you had to make your GIF less than 1 MB or it wouldn't work. later they expanded that to 2MB. it was awesome, unintentionally, because it forced people to be more efficient with frames and color and lossy choices. when that ceiling was raised, people just started making GIFs that were video clips and it died (imo)

that's very impressive.
as i tweeted, the whole look/sound etc, totally remind of the early releases by Scanner.
eg. Scanner 1 : https://www.discogs.com/Scanner-Scanner/master/1767734

that's beautiful stuff. discogs includes it in the "non-music" tag, but it is music to my ears at least :)

upload the tracks and a master gif to spotify. then make a podcast where you interview each contributor about the biz before playing their contribution at the end.

i think that would be listened to by...people in this thread. :)

it would be kind of fun to have a zoom call with all the original participants (including those whose clips i didn't end up using!) and then just have it go really, really poorly

Karl I'll make sure I do a "gallery opening" conference call someday when I fulfill my vision of having a little exhibit to go alongside the site itself.

i will definitely put that on my calendar!

*checks calendar*

yep, completely empty! :)

you know what would be fun for that? have as many OG participants as possible fill all the roles, and then fill in the others with other ilxors. then, we sit there and do conferencecall.biz as long as possible (probably 15 minutes), but the trick would be that we'll all have applebee's like buzzer/triggers to let us all know that the clip we originally recorded has been triggered and we have to do it. there would be no way to know what was coming next, for anyone. could be cool!

if we did that i'd have someone else be me and then i would play the live drone and be really high

that was zach scott, anyway. ok, all of that, plus we put someone in a zach scott corpse suit, just looking like shit, but they read my lines as me

karl havoc could do it

i highly encourage everyone to make as much profit as possible off of conferencecall.biz and then use it for as many anticapitalist ends as possible

tbh I was shocked and confused to be called an “old school” ilxor by Zach on Twitter because I’ve only been on here 10 or 11 years

The only people who started posting after me are frogbs and treeship I think

Me

dmac is old school
treesh is old school
silby is old school

anyone after me is old school, and i made my first post in...2006? it was bad

people before that were the golden age of ilx, in my mind. they're like legolas and gandalf and the rest. some of them were like gollum. there were a bunch of good characters

in my mind dmac treesh and silby have always been there. so, personally, to me, old school

if you fight intuition with facts, i will throw ideas at logic

please sign me up for conference call dot biz conference call party!

^^old schooler^^

Had to look myself up: 2004, happy to recreate my obvious magic again. :)

Think of me like an old school ghost, always present, often silent ❤️👻

I used to post as 'sonicdeath' - 06 - mostly not a heavy poster, but enjoy the discourse. Miss conference call biz, which I think I was introduced to via lumpen.

it's still alive!

also, i just thought of a way to trick ted cruz supporters into supporting me, this covid group i work with, and mutual aid

fuck yeah

xp

via lumpen? really? the chicago area group?

The zine, enjoyed the internet/radio stuff a bit, & maybe went to a few space related things, but mostly just read and enjoyed zine at Quimby's etc.

dang, that's awesome! i used to hang out a small bit with the lumpen crew back in 2006 (not very much at all, but a little) and i'd love to see what they said.

plus i'm currently concocting a plan to get a zine into Quimby's, full circle.

like, just Quimby's

att: karl malone

https://zenodo.org/record/4008297#.YRPvgy1Q3_Q

lol! what a cool database! it must have been hard to know when they had "enough" meows