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

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

How about the Rhymzone people? I asked them about you, 'karl malone?', and they simply replied 'metacarpal bone.'

last day of the auction. i know i have been obnoxious, and i am sorry.

but this is my battle station tweet for this last day, and i am going to use it to do a public shoutout to ILX and share a bunch of "making of" stuff. silby, part of this will for your archival package, assuming @rhizome doesn't suddenly realize that i was a digital artist

but please, humor me for one more day and celebrate with me if you're bored:

On this final day of the https://t.co/IpbI6ThK3c auction, I'd like to make a value proposition to my friends in the digital art world. As we've all seen from Beeple's deserved success: money talks! So let's talk about how conferencecall has been valued over the last 7 years.

— Zach TBD (@weinventyou) July 8, 2021

this will be truly a celebratory, bitter, triumphant, angry, emotional twitter thread that you won't want to miss

i hope you get a billion dollars and give me .05%

i do have a compensation package in mind for ilxors (and others who helped) if it ever did get recognized by whatever the art world is and took on a higher value, for real! i would love to finally send everyone a gift! but my first priority is my own living (covered for the next couple months now, due to people buying my paintings?!) and then mutual aiding the fuck out of it

but currently i have one heart sign by my post, so no compensation for ilxors, christmas is canceled. in the twitter thread i highlight a particular early post ("as art-projects go, this isn't a terrible idea at all. it's a very good idea.") which was so important to me and a big confidence boost. it's my love letter to ilx, but on twitter. sorry. i post a lot of love letters to ilx on ilx, so i thought i'd share this one with the outsiders

I've been popping in and out of this thread clearly at the worst possible times, cognitively, to understand what the hell is going on. That first post alone is a doozy. But I think I get it now.

i have you and conferencecall.biz to thank for my first (and only) television appearance with the version for adult swim

and on this thread, i'll archive one of my first interactions with the digital art world

Aww, no we didnt! Our archive is based on stewardship rather than ownership - we don't purchase work, and a number of the works in our archive are even owned by other people.

— Rhizome (@rhizome) July 8, 2021

lol josh, i'm sorry! for real. it is inherently confusing, i admit. and believe it or not, what's happening now is actually the more straightforward version of what was originally going to be an even more weird plan.

things that only happen after burning bridges

Great project, good luck with the sale!

— Rhizome (@rhizome) July 8, 2021

burn every bridge you find, i say. at least then other people may see the smoke and know you existed

love the painting jaq bought (i think it is the one at the top on the website? the link here is broken). I hope cc biz sells for millions.

thank you sufjan!

I'm hoping Silby can re-sell it (to a good home) and do much better than i can someday! i don't think i'm a bad salesmen, but i do think i'm an unorthodox one and sometimes i get myself into trouble. a steady hand could do better i think :)

however, in my giant twitter thread, which is still somehow going, i am trying to systematically do shoutouts to the many people who made conferencecall.biz a thing that was seen by several hundred thousand people instead of just a thousand or so. there were a ton of very lucky and non-repeatable things that happened

Hey Zach, I tried to ilxmail you but got poxy fuled. I’m currently on a course that is Instagram/social media for small business, and seeing you on this thread talk about not knowing how to present yourself online, I feel like a lot of the slides and stuff I’ve got from it could maybe help? I’ve been on a few of these things before that have sucked but this one seems to actually deal with more concrete ways to interact with folks. Drop me an email at samuelpooley at gmail dot com and I’ll email them over. It’s about small fashion businesses but a lot is transferable. Also I understand if you dgaf, a lot of this modern world shit also just makes me wanna roll my eyes a million times.

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.

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