ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘documentary’ Category

The Fundamental Kickstarter Film Incompatibility —

(This is being crossposted between my weblog and my kickstarter campaign for my three documentaries currently in production.) So, Kickstarters are now simply “part of the landscape” of filmmaking, just like it became part of the landscape of an awful lot of things out there which were previously cases of passing the hat, sinking personal […]

Atari and Arcade Kickstarters To Back —

I’m going to suggest two kickstarters you might consider backing. The first is a consumer hardware thing: The folks at Dream Arcades, who I interviewed for my own documentary, have a new easy-to-use emulation station that they’re making available. As of this writing, the Kickstarter is at about 25%. It’s not for everyone – not […]

A Cabinet of Infocom Curiousities —

This is big news, in the realm of game design studies. During the production of GET LAMP, I spent a lot of time digitizing or photographing all sorts of artifacts and documents related to Interactive Fiction and text adventures. This included books, advertisements, printouts, and various ephemera that various players or programmers had lying around […]

A Stayed Hand —

Time was, I’d go after the writer of the letter below and woodland creatures halfway across the Earth would look up and then jump in the opposite direction from the blast. Fact is, I have no time. He’s wrong, of course, on a bunch of levels. Facts he claims I put in wrong, well, I kinda […]

The 8-Bit Generation Reboot —

Back in 2012, I wrote an entry called 8-Bit Generation: Missing in Action, in which I described and lamented a seemingly lost and impeccably filmed documentary called The 8-Bit Generation. And on September 13th, 2014, on my 44th birthday, I was able to show an audience footage from the series, along with interviewing the producer […]

My First Arcade —

This nondescript building, sitting on the corner of Highway 52 and Fishkill Hook Road, has the distinction of being my very first Arcade. Naturally, it hasn’t been an arcade a very, very long time. I doubt it stayed an arcade past 1983, in fact. In the interim 30 years, it has served a bunch of purposes […]

Some Last Triage of the DEFCON Documentary —

I need to turn to my current projects, and my other commitments. I figured after going for a month and a half into the post-DEFCON Documentary release breach, I’d write some thoughts down before moving on. (Note, I do intend to release a fixed-up version of the documentary with a different audio encoding and with […]

The Secret Inaction of a Cancelled Documentary —

Privately, I’d been working on another documentary. Yes, I know I’m working on three, and yes, they are very time consuming, but when a subject inhabits your brain, won’t let go, you have to let it run wild for a while. The subject was Action Park, an amusement part in New Jersey that had one […]

Not for Hire: One Conference Documentary Director —

  Now that I’ve finished the DEFCON Documentary and the views are skyrocketing, I’ll mention that a few people approached me in the previous months about maybe, possibly…. would I do something similar for their conference? No. The DEFCON Documentary was a pretty unique situation, what with my very long history with DEFCON, the upfront […]