ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

XORcon and Chiptunes —

Spent a nice little day (or part of it) at XORcon, an impromptu (by most standards) conference held in an august Harvard hall, and in which a few dozen people listened to a few other people talk about a range of eclectic subjects. I took some photos, but they’re pretty universally terrible. Here’s one to […]

The Continuing Adventure of Archive Team —

Archiveteam, the proposed league of archiving superheroes I mentioned in a weblog entry and then another one, has been a wonderful success so far. The website is being updated frequently, the occasional project goes underway to save things, and a sad loneliness I felt about the process of saving things has been greatly assuaged. I […]

Ah, Joe Clark. —

Ah, Mister Joe Clark. A person who has created some sort of visual work that has spoken language will decide they want it to be more accessible, either to people who don’t speak the language or to a raft of other folks (who I’ll cover in a moment). Naturally, these people will start searching around […]

Google Catalogs, RIP —

I’m rather conflicted about the death of Google Catalogs, an excellent tech demonstration by Google of reading and browsing through catalogs of all stripe, implementing near-seamless searching of the content via OCR, so you could search for, say, “tuna hat” and if any of their catalogs (which went into the hundreds) had a tuna hat, […]

Rob Swindell and the Synchronet Museum —

I interviewed Rob Swindell for the BBS Documentary. At the time, he looked like this: This is, believe it or not, officially 6 and a half years ago. Time really does fly!  And if you need any further proof of that, his kid was asleep next to me during the interview, here: And here she […]

STAND BACK, WE’RE ARCHIVISTS —

Well, when I wrote my initial angry screed and then followed it up with an angry screed responding to the resulting angry responses I knew I had to act, so I registered archiveteam.org, sat on the IRC channel I mentioned (#archiveteam on EFnet) and waited to see what would happen. I’ve called for projects with collaborators […]

Tennis Court Phone —

    There’s a strange bit of editing in Debbie Does Dallas I wanted to point out, since there’s something filmatic to be learned from it. Debbie Does Dallas, in case you’ve missed it, is one of the most successful porn films of all time. The plot, such as it is, concerns some girls who are […]

The Little Black Diamond —

This little guy showed up in my “pending” folder of suspected spam: FleexuplixBes SOMEWHERE/members/natashha SOMEWHERE@gmail.com 91.124.200.77 Submitted: Great web-site!!! You did an amazing job!!! I enjoyed watching the videos!!! You guys are great! Talking about ideas, there\s this really good show, which I like a lot, and I\m sure you\ve heared about it. It\s called […]

Undistilled Amazing —

Fine, I’m prone to writing some pretty negative things. Let’s spend a quick respite with me marvelling over a site done right. To qualify with me for being a site that’s above and beyond, you have to fulfill some pretty deranged criteria. First of all, you have to do something few others can do. Next, […]

Why Hello There: An ASCII Reboot —

This is the first post of ASCII.TEXTFILES.COM under the new location and software. I’m now running WordPress, a very popular and very enjoyable weblogging software suite that first flirted with me years ago. Attempts to switch over to it seemed involved and tedious, considering how entrenched my hundreds of entries were under my old software. […]