ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for March, 2008

Blockparty Preparations —

One of my speakers (which I will not name), essentially agreed to Blockparty but didn’t, you know, totally go crazy studying what the heck it is. I was offering a flight and hotel and a chance to visit some old friends in the area, so they were all for coming. But after browsing the schedule […]

Luna City —

After spending many hours scanning at Steve Meretzky’s, house, I got a small amount of sleep and hopped a flight down to Washington, DC to drive over to Peter Hirschberg’s Luna City Arcade. I’ve gushed about this place quite a bit, and the family that is willing to open their home to complete strangers on […]

Scanning Infocom —

Saturday put me in Steve Meretzky’s basement. There are worse places to be than Steve Meretzky’s basement. As part of the GET LAMP project, I’ve been collecting artifacts and images throughout the commercial heydays of text adventures, and nobody got bigger than Infocom in the early 1980s. And Steve was one of the big designers […]

DVDs for the Blind —

It almost sounds like a joke, doesn’t it. DVDs for the blind. What are the blind watching DVDs for. There’s nothing to watch, really. Go listen to an audiobook or something, blind people. Well, you might be surprised to hear that the blind do buy DVDs, and play them, and enjoy the movies. Not all […]

Help Me Find Invisiclues 2000 —

I’ll give you what I’m doing, what I have, what I want. I’d like to add a level of Invisiclues to the packaging for one of the versions of GET LAMP. Let me explain what invisiclues are in this context. They’re a method of printing in “invisible ink”, such that you can’t see the printing […]

Ding Dong, ANSI Calling —

I had the pleasure of attending the ANSI Gallery showing this past January, and I also had the chance to purchase one of the items being shown; one of the small handful of ANSI display boxes against the wall. Today, the box with the ANSI displayer arrived. No complaints here! I’m glad to be the […]

Trixter’s Monotonous Triumph —

Trixter, that master of the truly old school IBM PC programming, has done it again. Already world-famous for his 8088 Corruption demo that put a type of full-motion video on an original IBM PC, has begun work on a music program. Big deal, your jaded mouth forms, but hear me out. He has made a […]

The Three Levels —

The longer I do stuff of a historical nature with computers, the more this puts me, ironically, in contact with people. And the more you end up in contact with people, the more you learn about people. The problem is, what if you don’t like what you learn? I had an absolutely horrible English class […]

The Tyranny of the Ratio —

Not every part of history is bright and cheerful, and some concepts which we think we’ve grown past are certainly still with us to the present day. In these cases, historical knowledge of the situation is even more disheartening than none at all. Nothing’s worse than knowing we’ve encountered a problem before, have dealt with […]

Awesome Trailer Review!! —

Yes, it’s real. Hi Jason, This looks well shot and edited. I can tell you really care for the people and their stories; it comes through in the way they address the camera. My only suggestion is that you might want to ease up on the dramatic piano and slow-motion. The tone you seem to […]