Jason Scott's Weblog
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 […]
I had a great time at the Vintage Computer Festival. My photographs of the event are here. You don’t know old-school until you’re playing a copy of Spacewar on a vintage PDP-1.. against the creator of Spacewar. Meeting Steven Wozniak again was also great. Actually, there’s so many great memories, I’ll have to go into […]