ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

Selling the Scene, Selling the Box —

For the first time since I started selling the documentary, I’ve actually added products to the order page. I’m interested to see how that goes. The first product is not mine, REALLY not mine. It’s a DVD-ROM of ANSI and regular Artscene material, compiled and put into one place by RaD Man of ACiD, who […]

So Long, Spaz —

When I was younger, there were a number of things which seemed just beyond cool when my friends or the promotional material would describe them. Around 10th grade in high school, I heard that there were these things called “Bio-Spheres” that would be little closed-off ecosystems that would maintain themselves and you could watch all […]

Another One Missed —

Among the people I was reaching out to for an interview for GET LAMP was Gregory Yob, the original creator of the game “Hunt the Wumpus”, which could be argued was one of the first adventure-like games on a computer. It was a long shot, but I take a lot of long shots and life […]

A Quick Endorsement —

I just wanted to drop a note about a company that’s been helping me a bit lately. Textfiles.com has gone through a number of hosting situations over the years. The material’s all over the place, I get tens of thousands of visitors a day, and basically I’m just a huge pain in the ass compared […]

Ant Farm —

Around 6am on Tuesday, the cache.cow.net machine started crashing. It crashed a half-dozen times this year, increasing in frequency, but this was the big one, and the box stopped successfully checking the filesystems properly. They simply couldn’t be fixed and the machine would no longer reboot. This box does a lot, so I couldn’t just […]

Bucks —

I spent a lot of money this week. Don’t cry for me, of course. I don’t overextend myself when I spend money in droves and I don’t bet the farm on long shots. Even if the BBS documentary never made a dime, it would have set me back about the same amount as if I’d […]

Podcasting —

I’ve finished uploading the second talk (actually the first, chronologically) that I gave at Notacon. It’s called “Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts” and I gave it on the Friday before my Wikipedia speech. The archive.org page for downloading it is here. Compared to the Wikipedia speech, this is pretty fluffy stuff, […]

The Stacks —

“I see you’re working on digitizing stuff,” John told me in IRC. “Do you want some of my magazines? I was really hesitating about throwing them out, and you can have them instead. I’d prefer that.” “Of course!” I said. “I’ll pay for shipping.” “There’s a lot of them.” “I’m fine with that.” While I […]

The Great Success of the Great Failure —

I did a lot of stuff at Notacon 3. I helped get a radio station up and running. I was in a game show. I moderated a panel on Hacker Media. And I did two presentations, one on a history of Podcasts and one called The Great Failure of Wikipedia, a sequel/elaboration on the weblog […]

Bummer! —

Internet Archive notifies me when someone posts a review of something I uploaded to the archive. You get told someone reviewed it and a link to the entry. Someone decided to review one of the raw interviews I uploaded, an ANSI artist named Tracer, at the end of the BBS Documentary run (I believe he’s […]