ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for July, 2007

Frontalot Video Released (Sort of) —

Entry written on August 9th. Frontalot finally released my video of his text adventure song. However, a caveat: you have to be a member of his Valued Sucker Program to grab a copy. So, for the moment it’s “out there” but only in a limited fashion. Remember, this thing is ending up on the GET […]

Koalas Are Little Bitches —

Entry written on August 8th. For years the most popular textfile on textfiles.com was the dependable and old-school ASCII Middle Finger. It definitely continues to reign as the most searched-for phrase that leads people to the site. There’s over a dozen files scattered throughout the directories that would answer the call for a text-based flip-off, […]

Major BBS: The Warezing and the Winning —

Entry written on August 8th. Someone pointed out a MajorBBS torrent to me. I’ve downloaded that particular collection and put it up on the BBS Software collection. The directory with the files that I got is here. Specifically, the zip file has the jaunty name of “MBBS4EVER”, that kind of overly ambitious and breathless filename […]

The Undone CONPHOTOS —

Entry written on August 8th. Some time ago, I started a project to capture all the photographs taken at hacker conventions/conferences, with “hacker cons” being defined as “things I would attend and not feel out of place at”. There were disparate places where people had collections of stuff up, photos they’d taken, but they were […]

Goodbye, Rat —

This fellow appears in the BBS Documentary in several places. He talks about phone codes and dialing to new places using phreak codes, and he happened to be talking when someone in the background fell off their chair and it ended up in a blooper reel on the DVD. He asked to be called “Ratphun” […]

The Delight of Decades —

In high school, I had a particularly memorable social studies teacher named Mr. Damon. His approach to classes was to have a monologue. This monologue lasted the entire semester and was punctuated by the ending and beginning of classes. I am not being exaggerative to say that many classes began with us sitting down, him […]

“We Can’t Have Nice Things.” —

There are a number of pithy, quickly cliche’d statements that nest in various weblogs. Some are dead on arrival, annoying the living crap out of me in milliseconds, while others are, for a shining moment, insightful and funny before being blurred and beat down into meaninglessness. Responding to events of spam, hacking attempts and commercialization […]

Kaminsky: The Rematch! —

So, the good news is that, due to a late change from the Defcon organizing staff, I am no longer worried about being scheduled opposite Dan Kaminsky. Now I’m merely scheduled after him. Same room. I wonder if our audiences are even the same? Just to talk a little about how I approach these presentations, […]

Fails Under Load —

Analyze things long enough, and you end up with general statements that are so far from what people might be interested in that it loses meaning for everyone. That’s the risk one takes with criticism that keeps looking skyward or at the “big picture”. But what the hell, it’s Thursday. If, in fact, you were […]

Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 3.0 —

This past weekend put me on the way to Indianapolis, Indiana, where my father went to graduate school and where I’d never even been near in my life. (I shot into some part of Indiana for the BBS Documentary but that was basically a fly-by, like I did with Minnesota, Kansas and Oklahoma. I’ve been […]