This blog entry is in response to this article from yesterday’s Boing Boing, where Josh Harris, founder of Pseudo.com (the startup I worked at for four years), called the company fake. An experiment in performance art.

First off. We were in no way fake, or not a “real” company. Pseudo did what we called “interactive television,” or what we now call podcasts.  We had employees, expenses (oohh did we ever have expenses), and put out new content daily. I even had a contract.

When I first started at Pseudo, we were a rather bloated company with 300+ employees running a bunch of different content channels.  Some channels did ok, like 88 Hip Hop, some didn’t really get many viewers at all. The channel I worked for, All Games Network (Wikipedia entry), was one of the top channels at the time. Live five days a week, and available on demand at any time.

My life was pretty much Pseudo. I could be found in our chatroom all day, nearly every day. I was on-air or producing 4 or 5 shows at any given time. We were a bubble startup and every single stereotype of bubble startups applied to us. A lot of work to be done by a small number of people, so everyone ended up doing some of everything.

Josh? He was rarely, if ever, in the office. He did throw us great parties, though, always with the seekrit room in back.

It was always pretty clear to us, as employees, that the company was being mismanaged. We were cool and hip with offices in an amazing location, but we had no business model.  We spent massive amounts of money on all sorts of stupid things. I remember very clearly spending one night on a business trip taste testing various kinds of sherry with a coworker of mine. Because I’d never had it before, and because I could. Loved that corporate card, and the idea of a limited “expense account” didn’t exist.

Pseudo even funded an all-female Quake tournament – Female Fragfest ’99. We flew finalists to NYC from all over the United States (one person came from Alaska), put them up in a nice hotel, took them around the city, and had our finals live in person. We got tons of press for doing it, girls playing Quake was a novelty at the time: Wired, the Village Voice, and SF Gate, among others . The tournament didn’t exactly bring in money, and it was hardly cheap to pull off.

I don’t honestly remember which happened first -  the layoffs, or Josh leaving – but it was all around the same time. Pseudo dropped to 200 employees, to 150, then finally to 75. Josh was replaced by an old-school experienced CEO from CNN.

The new CEO did his best. He reorganized the company entirely, including a really nasty round of layoffs, and changed us from lots of different channels, each with their own line up and schedule, to one channel with different shows. I became what they called an “EJ” for Electronic Jockey (get it? VJ? EJ) – and while I still concentrated on gaming, I also worked on a number of different shows, politics, wrestling, girly stuff. I filled in wherever a host needed someone to be on-air and in a chatroom at the same time.

The company still didn’t get the financial thing down, though. Kind of ironic, given that Silicon Alley Reporter was one of our shows. Instead of hunting for a viable business model, we spent a fortune covering the Democratic National Convention. It was neat, we were the only website to have a skybox at the time, but it didn’t really do anything for the company.

As with most of the bubble startups, one day we walked in and were told we could either have our final paycheck or two more months of health insurance. We were bankrupt.

It was the end of an era for us, and for many other folks who worked in startups. We had truly put our heart and soul into something we loved, something we believed in. Those of us who were still there the last day were there by choice, we’d been warned by senior management that we were probably going bankrupt months before. We were there because we believed in what we were doing, because we thought we were going to change the world, because we were young and willing to do whatever it took to make the copmany succeed.

And you know, I truly think we did something remarkable. Podcasting, ten years ago. Sure, we called it “interactive television,” but same difference. The interactivity was unique at the time, but it is no longer a special feature to create a single company around, it’s expected. No matter what you’re doing, you better have open communication.

A bunch of my old shows from AGN (the All Games Network) are still online (Real player required, because, well, that was the streaming tech available at the time). Sometimes online, anyway, they don’t always work. That was a pretty common thing at Pseudo.

The All Games Network still lives on, although it has gone through a few makeovers since the Pseudo days. And while I’m no longer part of the company, I still keep in touch with a number of people from our community then, and I imagine I always will.

Pseudo was very real and special to us. As for Josh Harris? Thanks for the memories, and good luck with your apple orchard.

Come ON, he just ruined the Andromeda Strain. Now he’s on to yet another of my absolute favorite books of all time?? I’m starting to think this is personal.

Unlike the Andromeda Strain, Brave New World has never really been done well on film. It was made into a TV movie a few years back, but it didn’t quite work. Maybe it’s one of those books that will never work on camera? Like the Andromeda Strain, it isn’t exactly a story with lots of action.

The Stand (Steven King) was the same way, I think. No matter how good the film production was ever going to be - and it wasn’t bad - it would never hold up the way the book did. You just can’t “show” fear and psychological terror on a screen.

Brave New World. Coming soon to a theater near you.

Ugh.

If you know me, you know I’m a little Broadway obsessed. And if there’s any musical I’m fixated on, it’s A Chorus Line (previous entry on it here). A Chorus Line is closing on Broadway, and is only running here in LA for another month or so, but that won’t stop me from listening to it constantly, or referencing it endlessly. After all, why would I stop now? I’ve been at it since I discovered the record at the age of 5.

The other day at work, I was listening to A Chorus Line on my iPod. I was getting punchy, and set my status on MySpace to “Stephanie thinks everything is beautiful at the ballet.” It’s a line from a song in the musical, but not exactly one of the most popular, or most well-known lines to people not obsessed with the show. So, imagine my surprise when I got an ad on my homepage for the musical in LA:

Sometimes I think ad targeting is creepy - I wonder how on earth it knew whatever about me.

But sometimes? It just makes me giggle.

Ok, this is long, I admit. But once I opened the flood gates on this, I kept going on and on and on. What can I say – mess with a story I ADORE, and this is what happens.

I love Michael Crichton books. I don’t think there’s a single one that I haven’t flown through, and then reread multiple times.

My favorite book and movie of his has always been the Andromeda Strain. It’s one of those rare book to movie adaptations that held pretty strictly to the original script. The result is not the most exciting movie in the world, after all, over half the story takes place in a dreary lab, but I love it.

The original movie was low budget, but still had some really memorable images, including a very graphic scene of a monkey dying from the virus. The scene looks horribly real, but the directors and producers still swear to this day that although they did knock the monkey unconsious, they did not hurt it. Don’t ask me how, it sure looks like a dead monkey to me.

…Spoilers follow…

To describe the plot of the original story:

A satellite lands in Piedmont, Utah. The entire town is killed, save for a baby and a drunk. The Wildfire team is called to determine what the virus is, and how to destroy it. The president tries to nuke Piedmont, but the team stops him first. They figure out what Andromeda is, but the virus renders itself inert due to its ability to continually mutate, so they just let it dissipate in the air. End of story. Epilogue: pilot burns up on reentry.

The plot of the miniseries:

A satellite lands in Piedmont, Utah. The entire town is killed, save for a baby and a drunk. The Wildfire team is called to determine what the virus is, and how to destroy it. Add in lots of backstories involving the various members of the Wildfire team, which now has five members (not four), two women, three men. A big conspiracy is going on involving the army, the department of homeland security, and the president. A reporter dude is following the story - he later becomes a target of an evil military plot to kill him. The virus keeps spreading, partially because a nuclear bomb is set off on Piedmont (hints of an additional conspiracy here - I was almost expecting to be told that an alien did it). Turns out the virus was sent from the future back to the past so it could be stopped, underwater mining was killing the natural bacteria that fought andromeda. There was a message coded into the virus container with a number and a logo (I still haven’t wrapped my head around how a virus replicates within a container – does it replicate the container? What’s a container, for that matter.). Wildfire replicates lots of the bacteria, the army drops it over the virus, virus is destroyed. End of story. Epilogue: Astronaut on the space station storing andromeda in a satellite.

First off - the miniseries just wasn’t a good movie. There were an insane number of dropped or unnecessary plot points, padding for time, I assume.

This may be science fiction, but there normally is at least some “reality” to the story. this? Grass would turn brown as Andromeda moved through it like a wildfire, with a computer screen updating in real time. The big action sequence came when the military dropped bacteria on the virus to kill it “right before it spread to LA.” Wouldn’t it be neat if you could SEE a virus in the air? And track it? “We have an outbreak of flu in the Arlington area today, winds suggest it could be over Georgetown by noon.” That’s just comical.

There are so many things that I had wanted to see redone in this movie that weren’t even in the miniseries, it’s sad. Andromeda replicating is an amazingly memorable image from the original film. The killing of the monkey, Dr. Leavitt having her seizure, THAT’s what I wanted to see in this movie.

I think I would have been ok with this miniseries had it been “Based on The Andromeda Strain.” But it wasn’t, it was billed as a remake. If something is going to be “remade,” it should be REMADE. Not changed beyond all recognition.

I’m just disappointed. I had a feeling this was going to be a mess - I mean, Ridley Scott doing a movie with no action? I never expected what I got, though. It was just awful.

So in case you were going to see the Andromeda Strain miniseries? Don’t. Rent the movie from 1971 instead.