ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

The Pinball Hall of Fame Needs You —

Permit me the indulgence of imploring the world to go play some games. As mentioned previously, I have been working on a second documentary besides the text adventure movie GET LAMP. This second one is about arcades and is called Arcade: The Documentary. My travels took me through Seattle (where I interviewed a developer of […]

Julien! Julien! Julien! —

His name is Julien McArdle, but I kept calling him Justin. I called him Justin so many times during the HOPE conference this past weekend that I figured he’d just punch me out, but I guess he’s a gentler soul than that. Don’t ask me why I kept doing this, but I kept calling him […]

See You in Portland —

From: O’Reilly Conferences To: jason@textfiles.com Subject: Speaker Details for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2006 Dear Jason, Your final session dates and times follow for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2006 in Portland, Oregon, July 24-28, 2006: – Conference Keynote Title: Making Tech Documentaries: How and Why Date: 07/27/2006 Time: 9:45am to 10:00am Session ID: […]

The Time Crunch —

Two stories and a manifesto. When I was in my senior year of high school, I was inspired by the Hofstra University humor magazine Nonsense to put together a humor magazine. Teaming up with two other buddies, John and Alex, we created a magazine called EsnesnoN, which was, of course, “Nonsense” backwards. The rules for […]

Contempt —

con·tempt (kn-tmpt) n. The feeling or attitude of regarding someone or something as inferior, base, or worthless; scorn. A danger of observation and collecting of data is that you end up finding meta-situations; perhaps you realize that in the end, all skateboarding is performance art, and then you realize that all athletic endeavors are performance […]

Awesome —

Without going into too many crazy details, I’m not feeling so great. I’ve resisted surgery and similar work because I know, from long-gained experience, that I recover slowly and every day of recovery is just absolutely horrible. I have slept for only 3-4 hours at a stretch, I still can’t quite talk, and let’s just […]

My Motivation Returns —

I wrote in an earlier weblog entry that one of my primary motivating factors in terms of completing or working on projects was less some sort of lofty goal regarding the meaning of my work, but the fact that I occasionally drift through periods of intense, hellish pain. This past week was one of those […]

Hey, Thanks —

Here’s a nice (unsolicited) recent review of the flick: I cannot speak highly enough of this film, and when I heard that it existed I couldn’t order it fast enough. What director Jason Scott has done is catalogue a piece of history that is otherwise ignored by documentations. He’s chronicled the development, rise and fall […]

Interview by Leahpeah —

This interview was conducted by leahpeah.com last week. The original is here: http://leahpeah.com/blog/interviews/jason-scott/. Jason Scott, creator of Textfiles.com, has created an archive that is constantly growing and changing. There are always people sending in new files for him to place into the massive collection he started from nothing. Work of this quality is only found […]

Limits —

This weblog finally got a little thing attached to it: now you have to type in a keyword (it’s currently “ascii” but it’ll change) to post your comment. It’s a slight annoyance, relatively, with an extra weird step just to say something to me and to people who read this weblog. But the fact is, […]