Jason Scott's Weblog
It’s kind of rare that I’m contacted by people simply because they assume I love text and the manipulation of it. That is, it’s one thing to go “here’s some old computer stuff, you would like it” and another for someone to go “as someone who can appreciate the creation and manipulation of text, you […]
I attend a number of conferences over the months, usually as a speaker and sometimes as an attendee, hanging out, talking, having a good time. I wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be speaking at a convention called Notacon. Notacon is going to be held in Cleveland, Ohio and will feature a bunch of […]
A little milestone went by in the last day or so: my site cd.textfiles.com has now surpassed 1,000,000 files hosted. (Actually, more like 1,029,000 and growing, but still, a friggin’ million.) I don’t really go out of my way to talk about that site all that much, mostly because of the fact that it’s a […]
I’ve opened up a little experiment, a little idea today. It’s called “The Adventurers’ Club” and here’s how it works. The next documentary, GET LAMP, is about text adventures. The equipment I used to shoot the BBS Documentary is a bit long in the tooth, and there’s been a lot of advancement in the 4 […]
A friend of mine was kind enough to forward me some discussions between himself and a gentleman who has declared himself “The Founder of the BBS”. His name is Bob Shannon, and he’s most certainly some level of “old school”; he’s done work with Commodores since the early 1980s, created a magazine for Commodores that […]
This essay is going to make a bizzare sort of logic, but not the kind of logic most people like in an essay. Sorry about that; this is how my brain works. The catalyst for this comes from two different articles, one about Interactive Fiction and one about Filmmaking. Since I happen to be making […]
In case some of you are wondering, I am in fact adding new BBS Documentary raw footage to archive.org. It just takes a little time because I have to go over the recorded hour, make sure there’s nothing too actionable or problematic in the footage (for the interviewee’s protection, and mine), and then generate the […]
I’m often asked about other possible subjects a film-savvy technical historian guy might cover. I get a good amount of mail and conversation with this question, and the suggestions generally fall into a bunch of what-you-might-expect standards. One which people ask me a lot about is, “Why don’t you do a documentary about virus writers […]
Back in October 2004, I wrote a review of the Last Starfighter musical, raving about how much I enjoyed it. My positive review, coupled with others, opened doors for those guys. They wrote me and thanked me and sent me a copy of the soundtrack they’d recorded as a demo, a precious gift. Well, they’ve […]
As promised, I went out and rented a U-Matic tape deck. One day, $100. I hooked it up through my DV-deck (this converts it over to a digital stream) and then dropped it onto a hard drive. Total time to transfer all thirteen 20-minute tapes: about 5 hours. Total space: 52 gigabytes. Of course I […]