ASCII by Jason Scott
type: channel
description: Jason Scott's Weblog
date: 2026-05-12T00:01:28Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: Manuals Plus: The Wrap-Up
items: In Which My Situation is Discussed.
items: I No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals. (But You Probably Should.)
items: Bodaciously True and Totally Awesome
items: The Dying Computer Museum
items: The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing
items: A Never-Ending Block Party
items: I Continue To No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals
items: I Am No Longer Attending Vintage Computer Festivals
items: In Realtime: Digital Heaven (And a Call for Donations)
items: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
items: The Great Aboveground Empire
items: Discord, or the Death of Lore
items: The Grind a Day
items: Priority and Process
items: How I Do It, Buffered By Cries I Am Doing It Wrong
items: Archiving in the Time of Streaming
items: Infinite Inboxes of Infinity
items: Is This Thing On?
items: The Full BBS Documentary Interviews are Going Online

Manuals Plus: The Wrap-Up
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2026-05-10T20:27:06Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Just a little over ten years ago, I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars […]
encoded: <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" data-attachment-id="5836" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5833/c4bhiptwqaadvvy" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/C4bhiPtWQAAdVvy.jpg" data-orig-size="1024,576" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="C4bhiPtWQAAdVvy" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/C4bhiPtWQAAdVvy.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/C4bhiPtWQAAdVvy.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5836" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/C4bhiPtWQAAdVvy.jpg 1024w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/C4bhiPtWQAAdVvy-300x169.jpg 300w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/C4bhiPtWQAAdVvy-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Just a little over ten years ago, I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars over the course of saving this collection from being discarded. Naturally, the next step would simply be to digitize them all. That took longer. As of a short time ago, a collection of 13,000 manuals now lives on the Internet Archive. It is, essentially, all the manuals that will be digitized or could be digitized, sans sets I’ll explain about shortly. In other words, the loop is now complete. Saved, stored, moved, now online for anyone to read. If somehow you missed this apparently core event of what people think of when they think of me, there’s so many weblog posts it’s almost weird to …

In Which My Situation is Discussed.
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2025-12-23T03:48:04Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Sometimes I think about the person who had apparently binge-watched a pile of my presentations, looked at a couple that had been more recent, and announced that while they loved my work, it was a sad thing to consider how I was slowing down – how my energy wasn’t reflected like it used to be, […]
encoded: Sometimes I think about the person who had apparently binge-watched a pile of my presentations, looked at a couple that had been more recent, and announced that while they loved my work, it was a sad thing to consider how I was slowing down – how my energy wasn’t reflected like it used to be, specifically citing a presentation I gave in Europe as proof. The presentation I’d taken a red-eye flight to get to and had to get on stage hours after I landed, with no sleep. There’s a wide gap, in many facets, of the presentation of myself that I put online and the life I live and have lived day to day. My hope is the most interesting aspects are seen by a public that enjoys my company, and not seen by people who find me a grating somnambulance in an online life they’re just trying to get by in. But regardless, mythology continues to rule the day. <img decoding="async" width="477" height="1024" data-attachment-id="5802" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5783/bafkreig3xqy4qda66yzezdbwhcfitdhaqjqmtsmjxg47yok72c43exb6dm" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/bafkreig3xqy4qda66yzezdbwhcfitdhaqjqmtsmjxg47yok72c43exb6dm.jpg" data-orig-size="931,2000" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="bafkreig3xqy4qda66yzezdbwhcfitdhaqjqmtsmjxg47yok72c43exb6dm" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/bafkreig3xqy4qda66yzezdbwhcfitdhaqjqmtsmjxg47yok72c43exb6dm-477x1024.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/bafkreig3xqy4qda66yzezdbwhcfitdhaqjqmtsmjxg47yok72c43exb6dm-477x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5802" style="width:147px;height:auto" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/bafkreig3xqy4qda66yzezdbwhcfitdhaqjqmtsmjxg47yok7…

I No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals. (But You Probably Should.)
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2025-07-29T00:32:13Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I attended INIT HELLO over the past weekend, and had a very good time. Located near Baltimore and spanning 2 days, the event was an Apple II themed potluck and contained about 50 people using said machines, doing workshops and giving a smattering of presentations. I ran the streaming/recording machine and even got a chance […]
encoded: I attended INIT HELLO over the past weekend, and had a very good time. Located near Baltimore and spanning 2 days, the event was an Apple II themed potluck and contained about 50 people using said machines, doing workshops and giving a smattering of presentations. I ran the streaming/recording machine and even got a chance to give a little speech at the end. An excellent repast all around. Why INIT HELLO even happened is a subject for another time. Today’s subject is also not specifically about the building where it was held, but now’s a good time as any to tell you about it if you’ve never heard of System Source. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="856" height="527" data-attachment-id="5776" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5774/screen-shot-2024-02-23-at-12-16-02-pm-2" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screen-Shot-2024-02-23-at-12.16.02-PM-1.png" data-orig-size="856,527" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Screen-Shot-2024-02-23-at-12.16.02-PM" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screen-Shot-2024-02-23-at-12.16.02-PM-1.png" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screen-Shot-2024-02-23-at-12.16.02-PM-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-5776" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screen-Shot-2024-02-23-at-12.16.02-PM-1.png 856w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screen-Shot-2024-02-23-at-12.16.02-PM-1-300x185.png 300w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screen-Shot-2024-02-23-at-12.16.02-PM-1-768x473.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 856px) 100vw, 856px" /> System Source is a business sort of business that handles training and IT and does all that …

Bodaciously True and Totally Awesome
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2025-03-14T02:16:12Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This first paragraph is a paradox. I want you to go to a funding campaign and click on a button and support a project. But the project is one that expects you to be the kind of person who loves reading. I personally think there might be a slight amount of people who don’t have […]
encoded: This first paragraph is a paradox. I want you to go to a funding campaign and click on a button and support a project. But the project is one that expects you to be the kind of person who loves reading. I personally think there might be a slight amount of people who don’t have much time to read but respect the idea of someone making a nine book series and helping them to promote it. For those people, click here. Otherwise, keep reading. When we want to amuse ourselves, Chris Orcutt and I calculate out how long we’ve been friends, because the number is massive by most standards and it’s one of our little consistencies through our individual, chaotic lives. The number as of this writing is 43 years. We are no-holds-barred fans of each other, and of our divergent goals and efforts in our paths. The bias is deep-seated and profound, palpable really. If you’re building up a court case against one of us, the other will not join you, and in fact you may find yourself with a spoon in your neck before the proposal gets out of your mouth. We are bonded and we back each other up. This round, it’s my turn. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="960" height="448" data-attachment-id="5746" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5744/444935337_1032370811637443_5775436845889832375_n" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/444935337_1032370811637443_5775436845889832375_n.jpg" data-orig-size="960,448" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="444935337_1032370811637443_5775436845889832375_n" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/444935337_1032370811637443_5775436845889832375_n.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/444935337_1032370811637443…

The Dying Computer Museum
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2024-08-19T03:35:17Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe […]
encoded: One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient hardware. I assure you that to a segment of the population, this is an irresistible proposition. It’s also, ultimately, one that even the most ardent fans of “how it was” will leaf away from, because mainframes are their own wacky old world, like using a taffy-pull hook, and appeal on a day-to-day basis to a relative handful of die-hards. But in 2011, the Living Computer Museum announced itself with the kind of slick webpage that promised computer history buffs a new wonderland. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1006" height="1024" data-attachment-id="5678" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672/lcmpage" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/lcmpage.png" data-orig-size="1353,1377" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="lcmpage" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/lcmpage-1006x1024.png" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/lcmpage-1006x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-5678" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/lcmpage-1006x1024.png 1006w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/lcmpage-295x300.png 295w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/lcmpage-768x782.png 768w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/lcmpage.png 1353w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1006…

The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2024-05-22T01:11:01Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Imagine, if you will, a vast river. It flows fast, so fast that when you look away and look back it’s in many ways an entirely different river, not just a slightly different one. It used to be blue with an occasional brown or black. Nowadays, it’s basically brown and black and a signficant amount […]
encoded: Imagine, if you will, a vast river. It flows fast, so fast that when you look away and look back it’s in many ways an entirely different river, not just a slightly different one. It used to be blue with an occasional brown or black. Nowadays, it’s basically brown and black and a signficant amount of it lets off a slow-moving steam that you’re positive causes cancer in 99% of living things. You used to swim in this river, but now you generally don’t, and by “generally don’t” you mean “never”. Instead your interactions are thus: You have an occasional cinderblock you wouldn’t feel comfortable throwing in the tiny lagoon you mostly hang out in, or the notably smaller (and cleaner, and calmer) rivers you swim in these days. So, you walk down to the bank of the river of lost dreams and sulfuric nightmares and throw that cinderblock as far as you can to see what sort of massive splash it causes, and what horrors lurking underneath its surface will temporarily breach to snap and bite and thrash until it goes back to a flowing, nauseating shit-river. Anyway, that’s how I tweet. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="680" height="495" data-attachment-id="5643" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5638/f818uzowkaa-tej" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/F818UzOWkAA-TEJ.jpg" data-orig-size="680,495" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="F818UzOWkAA-TEJ" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/F818UzOWkAA-TEJ.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/F818UzOWkAA-TEJ.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5643" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/F818UzOWkAA-TEJ.jpg 680w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploa…

A Never-Ending Block Party
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2024-04-21T01:46:56Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Kerfuffles are Kerfuffles. Causing one recently, with its particularly low-stakes aspects (what’s done is done, no actions appear to be planned, I’m already doing things differently, etc.) allowed me to at least re-visit a policy I’ve been somewhat silently instituting for years. I block. I block frequently, quickly, and across every single medium that consitutes […]
encoded: Kerfuffles are Kerfuffles. Causing one recently, with its particularly low-stakes aspects (what’s done is done, no actions appear to be planned, I’m already doing things differently, etc.) allowed me to at least re-visit a policy I’ve been somewhat silently instituting for years. I block. I block frequently, quickly, and across every single medium that consitutes “communication” in the contemporary era. I’ve been doing it for well over a decade, but somewhere after my heart attack I upped the frequency and dropped the level at which the “block” action gets enacted. It is very, very easy to find yourself unable to directly communicate with me via the method I blocked you. Why anyone would possibly care that I do this (beyond the people I block) is not entirely my responsibility, but I think there’s a point, so let’s keep going. First, I’m rather easy to find and communicate with. I have many channels of ingress, from phone numbers and e-mails to social media and streaming. I do this mostly because I’m trying to be there when people have materials to donate to Internet Archive, or if they’re in distress and need to reach out to someone. Both these situations happen more than one might think. I appreciate both when they do, and do my best under the circumstances. But the downside is that people can reach me very easily and all your instincts that there are spectacular counts of truly damaged individuals who have effortlessly acquired internet access and spray their damage around the world like some urine-filled lawn sprinker are, as I can personally attest, correct. At some point, depending on how far back you have persisted online, there was this unspoken contract that you gave someone multiple bites of the apple to show how awful they were, under the theory that the first interaction was an inadvertently bad impression. That contract is no longer in effect. That’s a large contingency of folks gone; the masters of showing up in the middle of a conversation or communic…

I Continue To No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2024-04-12T23:44:17Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the situation or the context, I figured it was worth writing a few quick addendums. Naturally, as is the case when […]
encoded: As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the situation or the context, I figured it was worth writing a few quick addendums. Naturally, as is the case when you post anything anywhere in public, I am called a liar. I’ll simply say that everything I describe in the blog entry happened. I contacted a VCF administrator and was told it was all disposed of, and that they kept the bins. I am fine with people claiming that disposal was not what happened, but this is what I was told, directly, in human words. The fact that I am seeing contradictory and confusing descriptions of what happened is not a checkmark destined for the Win column. A few people have rushed to indicate that I need to be more careful describing “which” VCF entity is at fault. I am sad to report to them all that the Byzantine VCF structure of name licensing, geographic branding, and internal corporate entity is meaningless to anyone six inches away. You all know each other and you all interchangeably use nomenclature. If you are part of an organization that calls itself some form of “VCF” and need an opportunity to write a statement about how your organization in a solitary/separate entity and should be considered more worthy or ethical than others, feel absolutely free. A small sliver of people were concerned I was saying that I was never going to go to any computer history conference or event again. I am a free person with the freedom to attend whatever is open to the public. As it stood, however, VCF East was the easiest event for me to attend, so it was where I saw people the most. A minor point is that I considered attendance a form of endorsement, but that is my own personal choice. The chances of me attending other events is, like death by cow, low but never zero. The rest of the discussions I have seen from the blog entry, raging in the usual stages…

I Am No Longer Attending Vintage Computer Festivals
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2024-04-11T18:02:52Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn’t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right. Years ago, clearing out the Information Cube, I donated its contents to roughly 10 organizations, carefully splitting things up for the best home, […]
encoded: I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn’t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right. Years ago, clearing out the Information Cube, I donated its contents to roughly 10 organizations, carefully splitting things up for the best home, as I’d been entrusted with these materials by many great folks who believed I’d make the right choices. Videogames went to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, books and many printed materials to the Internet Archive, piles of game-related magazines went to the Strong Museum of Play, multiple sets of Wired magazine went to a scanning group, and so on. This was a shipping container worth of material, so we are talking dozens and dozens of crates, received by trustworthy and great folks across the entire country. Among these donations were a set of publications, mostly IEEE-related but with a few other sets of titles, to the Vintage Computer Federation, based in New Jersey. The donation was roughly this: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" data-attachment-id="5588" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587/7824971918_5e9d4b06da_k" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/7824971918_5e9d4b06da_k.jpg" data-orig-size="2048,1365" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="7824971918_5e9d4b06da_k" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/7824971918_5e9d4b06da_k-1024x683.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/7824971918_5e9d4b06da_k-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5588" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/7824971918_5e9d4b06da_k-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://ascii.…

In Realtime: Digital Heaven (And a Call for Donations)
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2024-02-02T18:55:17Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Imagine an epic of nine years having a happy ending. I’ve written so much about what is now called the Manuals Plus Collection. Let’s go find those: If you don’t want to walk those, I’ll make it simple: I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out […]
encoded: Imagine an epic of nine years having a happy ending. I’ve written so much about what is now called the Manuals Plus Collection. Let’s go find those: In Realtime: Saving 25,000 Manuals In Realtime: Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals In Realtime: It Is Almost Halfway Done In Realtime: Day 2 Felt Like Week 4 In Realtime: It Is Done A Small Dark Detour In Realtime: Post-Mortem A Little Bit of the Manuals If you don’t want to walk those, I’ll make it simple: I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out of the business, and while a lot of well-meaning people talked a good game, they wanted to cherry-pick (people getting rid of stuff hate cherry-pickers), and I drove down to show I was serious, and after a week of work with MANY volunteers and contributors, we ended up with pallets of documentation inside boxes, numbering something like 50,000-60,000 manuals. (A rough estimate.) Then they were stored in a storage unit. Then they were stored in a closed coffee house. Then they were transported to California. Then they were stored until last year, 2023. Last year, a group called DLARC, doing digitizing and indexing projects around ham radio and radio technology, worked with me and the archive to sort out a few pallets of the manuals for products related to the history of radio/network technology, and off they went overseas to be scanned. And as of this month, the evaluated, professionally-scanned and available-to-the-world manuals are beginning to show up in this collection: The Manuals Plus Collection <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="789" data-attachment-id="5583" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5578/manuals-1" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/manuals-1.png" data-orig-size="1143,881" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0"…

Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-06-05T02:38:25Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it, which can be summarized as “this magazine got to be very large, very extensive, and probably served as the […]
encoded: There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it, which can be summarized as “this magazine got to be very large, very extensive, and probably served as the unofficial ‘bible’ of the state of hardware and software to the general public throughout the 1980s and 1990s.” While it was just a pleasant little computer tabloid when it started in 1979, it quickly grew to a page count that most reasonable people would define as “intimidating”. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" data-attachment-id="5544" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k.jpg" data-orig-size="2048,1365" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="3344549422_d8139b83bc_k" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k-1024x683.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5544" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k-300x200.jpg 300w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k-768x512.jpg 768w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3344549422_d8139b83bc_k.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> In a world that saw hundreds of magazines …

The Great Aboveground Empire
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-05-22T21:57:49Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I’m about to write an essay that will lead to mass misinterpretation or out of context quoting, and before I get into that situation (intentionally), I have to create this entire sidebar to talk about a social construct I’ve observed over the years. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the Inside Out, but this is a different […]
encoded: I’m about to write an essay that will lead to mass misinterpretation or out of context quoting, and before I get into that situation (intentionally), I have to create this entire sidebar to talk about a social construct I’ve observed over the years. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the Inside Out, but this is a different online (and offline) situation to that. Very quickly: The “Inside Out” is my belief that there are people who believe they are in private spaces online that are in fact not private at all but they’re absolutely convinced of it and the resulting friction is nearly blinding when it comes to a head. What I’m talking about is something else entirely. It’s a situation where people want all the cachet of being outside the boundaries, in lawless territories where you survive on the wit and bravery (or brutality) of Taking The Initiative and damn the costs and risks, but also want to be protected and safe with all the constructs we in Civilization provide so you don’t wake up with your throat slit and your pockets turned out. They want a fictional in-between place that doesn’t bend to the “inconvenient” rules and yet lets you summon them in a moment’s (or hour’s) notice when the game doesn’t go your way and you need to get the DM to re-roll for a Natural 20. I have my own term for this phenomenon: The Aboveground, a mystical (and profitable) land where people want to believe they’re under the radar, being all subtle and hidden, when they’re actually functioning in plain sight. (This is very different, I should note, from people who are functioning in an underground manner in plain sight with knowing intention of being watched and findable, just doing so in a double-switchback situation that means they function in that environment. Most people don’t actually want to take on the burden of this, but some do.) I’ll give a hypothetical that I’ve used before trying to explain my thinking. The Underground wants to do sketchy shit, so by word of mouth, everyone knows to…

Discord, or the Death of Lore
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-03-06T07:13:07Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the one standing at the death of all things, and while it means a lot of moments of rescue […]
encoded: I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the one standing at the death of all things, and while it means a lot of moments of rescue and recovery, it also means knowing, looking across at that which thrives and bustles, the desiccation and destruction to come. The only part of the fog of the future that’s guaranteed is the moment it switches from theory to a wall of iron and then darkness. All this to say: Discord. Twitter, in its own death throes, its own misery, will always stand in its later years as a fantastic tool for raining down misery and pain on others with a simple “quote tweet”, and I’ve been guilty of such on the absolute regular. Few of my tweets maneuvered past 100,000 “impressions”, but this one most definitely did: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="775" height="877" data-attachment-id="5510" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509/image-6-2" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-6.png" data-orig-size="775,877" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="image-6" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-6.png" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-6.png" alt="" class="wp-image-5510" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-6.png 775w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-6-265x300.png 265w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-6-768x869.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 775px) 100vw, 775px" /> The last I checked, that tweet got the attention of over a quarter-million individuals …

The Grind a Day
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-03-05T05:14:34Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: 4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk system worked, how it could be manipulated, and then, ultimately, how legions of companies and individuals used those manipulations to “protect” commercial […]
encoded: 4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk system worked, how it could be manipulated, and then, ultimately, how legions of companies and individuals used those manipulations to “protect” commercial software. Left to just that level of knowledge, this would store 4am in the cattle car of all the people I know of and deal with on a frequent basis. They’re the reason so many people know the penguin gets fat on the second run-through of Mario 64, or that what a fast-load cartridge actually does for a Commodore 64. Maybe not enough, probably too much. But 4am is an engineer, and also a documentation writer, and also the aforementioned resister of dumb and deja vu, so not only did we end up with examples of crack writeups that rival a 1930s pulp story for adventures and twists, but also a series of increasingly complex and intense tools for the simple goal of removing the protection from Apple II software. Somewhere in the middle of this journey, now well into the realm of a decade, came John Keoni Morris and Applesauce, itself an overengineered-for-the-purpose multi-tool that started with doing flux readings of Apple-only floppies and then expanded out into masses of other related systems and setups, and all allowing us to be broken free from chains. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="5506" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5498/image-5-2" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-5.png" data-orig-size="1024,768" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="image-5" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/u…

Priority and Process
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-02-13T01:48:51Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The reason I’m doing a bunch of entries around the theme of “A couple people asked, so here’s a long and drawn-out answer that touches on a host of considerations” is because the era of “I am on multiple platforms that harvest my low-level brainwaves and let me make two-sentence jabs masquerading as insight” is […]
encoded: The reason I’m doing a bunch of entries around the theme of “A couple people asked, so here’s a long and drawn-out answer that touches on a host of considerations” is because the era of “I am on multiple platforms that harvest my low-level brainwaves and let me make two-sentence jabs masquerading as insight” is coming to a close. In its dimming light, I can make out the glow of people wanting to know some of the opaque processes I engage in, either as inspiration or a warning. That approach (one focus drains, another rises) is the core of how I do everything, so let me answer the curiosity of a few people who wondered why I choose what I do and how I do it. The usual caveats: One person’s approach to life, especially as described by themselves, is an observed artwork, not a curated manual. Priorities shift and opportunities flicker and fade, and it’s not a good idea to have made your priorities or opportunities the defining (or worse, only) aspects of your life. In a year I could read all this and laugh at that deluded bastard, unaware of the Coming Thing that will make any of it irrelevant. Consider this all a gentle introspective song played in words and not a thundering drumbeat demanding you march in lock step. I am also focusing on my Internet Archive era, not how I approached things back when I was a systems administrator and doing documentaries on the side, that is, a documentary filmmaker who administered systems to pay his travel and camera equipment costs. I’m talking about 2011 to the present. With all that out of the way. On a personal level, I’ve been speedrunning a game called “Die With The Least Amount Of Confusion About What To Do With Your Remaining Stuff”, and professionally, I’ve been running a project called “Die With Maximum Finished Projects Lacking Interest By Co-Workers And Reasonable Public Levels of Awareness Of My Efforts”. Both are going quite swimmingly. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" data-attachment-id="5…

How I Do It, Buffered By Cries I Am Doing It Wrong
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-02-08T04:04:47Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The last entry garnered an awful lot of attention. While I would normally write in such a way as to move around between unrelated subjects, sometimes I’m backed into a corner to do a follow-up or second part; the amount of people who have wandered into my field of vision to ask me for deep […]
encoded: The last entry garnered an awful lot of attention. While I would normally write in such a way as to move around between unrelated subjects, sometimes I’m backed into a corner to do a follow-up or second part; the amount of people who have wandered into my field of vision to ask me for deep details of what they variously call my toolchain, setup, or approach has now overflowed my life’s efficiency. Here is a quick time-saving suggestion: Skip everything I’m writing down to the nice picture of the videotapes. Then read what’s after that and don’t comment. Still here? Let’s go. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="913" height="637" data-attachment-id="5468" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5467/fbhxi5oxoaazzp5" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FbhXi5OXoAAzzp5.jpg" data-orig-size="913,637" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="FbhXi5OXoAAzzp5" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FbhXi5OXoAAzzp5.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FbhXi5OXoAAzzp5.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5468" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FbhXi5OXoAAzzp5.jpg 913w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FbhXi5OXoAAzzp5-300x209.jpg 300w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FbhXi5OXoAAzzp5-768x536.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 913px) 100vw, 913px" /> There are many things which set me off, but few have been as consistent as Nerd Bullying, especially where people who consider themselves kings of very tiny kingdoms take their knowledge and smoosh it in a bowl with their social awkwardness and lack of cue-observing and come out of the gate with a way-too-overtuned neg-t…

Archiving in the Time of Streaming
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-02-04T23:53:55Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing is already hopelessly complicated and gaining enough of a foothold to feign interest is olympic-level effort. For people who do […]
encoded: Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing is already hopelessly complicated and gaining enough of a foothold to feign interest is olympic-level effort. For people who do make it the center, your description fills them with a never-abating dread that you’re going to get the explanation “wrong”, or that you’re going to give the Outsiders a bad impression. So let’s begin at the beginning, again. My parents’ divorce, taking place in the realm of the beginning of the 1980s, was not in any way friendly and in fact rather contentious. I wasn’t yet a teenager, and I was the oldest, and most notable for the purposes of this story, my mother gathered up her children and scooted off to first a hotel and then a location with family, without telling my father where she had taken us. In modern parlance, the term is “child abduction”, although I’m sure my mother didn’t think that’s what she was doing. Ultimately, connections were made, a nasty divorce proceeding happened, nobody was shot, stabbed, restrained, or attacked. But in many presentations I’ve given, I mark the moment of being scuttled out of the family home into the great unknown of Outside The Neighborhood as being when my focus and awareness of the world fundamentally changed, because as she put things into the station wagon and tearfully told her kids to get ready to go, she also asked us to take what we needed. Which is a difficult question for someone in the realm of ten years old. I needed a blanket and my dog. Woven into the simple declaration take what you need are a host of world and perspective-changing understandings of what you and need are. Let’s not overplay the trauma aspect of it all, and focus on the concepts being dropped on me and my siblings, which first and foremost is a crumbling of rock-solid foundations. Foundations of family, to be sure, but also possession, con…

Infinite Inboxes of Infinity
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2023-01-23T23:19:09Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Carcinization is the tendency of reality to keep making things into Crabs or Crab-like creatures. (De-Carcinization is when it goes the other way, and in fact there’s evidence of oscillation between the two states.) It’s the sort of thing that sounds fantastically interesting, the shallow end of the thinking pool, but then leaves you confused […]
encoded: Carcinization is the tendency of reality to keep making things into Crabs or Crab-like creatures. (De-Carcinization is when it goes the other way, and in fact there’s evidence of oscillation between the two states.) It’s the sort of thing that sounds fantastically interesting, the shallow end of the thinking pool, but then leaves you confused as to what to do with that information – you can’t fully stop it, and there’s no reason you might specifically want to. And whatever crab-making is happening now doesn’t really affect you in the short or even long-term – it’s just happening. What I discovered, this late in life, is I turn everything into an inbox. Again, I’m not sure this is going to change your existence or opinion in any way, but here we are. In the dim mists of decades ago, I appear to have launched into a serialization of projects that I’ve never recovered from, making piles of to-dos and tasks and then attacking them, often at the expense of all else, for hours and hours. The earliest efforts of what became TEXTFILES.COM was me gathering textfiles from all sorts of bulletin board systems, logging in to grab copies and take text-based snapshots of what was there, then dragging it home into piles of floppy disks, with the goal of…. well, something. I started calling the disks “The Works, Disk _____” as I visualized, at 13, that I would one day have a BBS called The Works and these disks would be the starting seed vault that it would grow from. The fact this happened is quite remarkable to me, but it happened. The Works BBS under Jason became the Works BBS under David and then Matt and then Others, and I then took the textfiles of The Works BBS and it became a site, itself a collection of descriptions that came because I created a second Inbox, one of describing roughly 50,000 files by myself. That all seems like a rather straightforward observation, except it turns out that nearly everything I am doing, in all situations, has become an inbox, a collection of…

Is This Thing On?
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2020-08-13T23:51:50Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: OK, let’s bring this thing back. Talk to you soon.
encoded: OK, let’s bring this thing back. Talk to you soon. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="5386" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5340/image62" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62.jpg" data-orig-size="1920,1080" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Image62" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62-1024x576.jpg" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62-1024x576.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5386" width="580" height="326" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62-300x169.jpg 300w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62-768x432.jpg 768w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image62.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px" />

The Full BBS Documentary Interviews are Going Online
type: item
creator: Jason Scott
date: 2018-01-24T04:01:05Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This year, the full 250 hours of interviews I conducted for the BBS Documentary are going online at the Internet Archive. There’s already a collection of them up, from when I first set out to do this. Called “The BBS Documentary Archive“, it’s currently 32 items from various interviews, including a few clip farms and […]
encoded: This year, the full 250 hours of interviews I conducted for the BBS Documentary are going online at the Internet Archive. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="5290" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289/cling4" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cling4.jpg" data-orig-size="640,470" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="cling4" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cling4.jpg" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-5290" src="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cling4-300x220.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="220" srcset="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cling4-300x220.jpg 300w, https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cling4.jpg 640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> There’s already a collection of them up, from when I first set out to do this. Called “The BBS Documentary Archive“, it’s currently 32 items from various interviews, including a few clip farms and full interviews of a bunch of people who sat with me back in the years of 2002-2004 to talk about all matter of technology and bulletin board history. That collection, as it currently stands, is a bit of an incomplete mess. Over the course of this project, it will become a lot less so. I’ll be adding every minute of tape I can recover from my storage, as well as fixing up metadata where possible. Naturally you will be asked to help as well. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="5291" data-permalink="https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289/cap01" data-orig-file="https://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cap01.jpg" data-orig-size="640,480" data-comments-opened="1" …