ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

The Last Starfighter: The Musical: The Sountrack —

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 […]

Blessed Is the Followthrough —

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 […]

Vintage Computers, Vintage Film —

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 […]

One From the Mailbag —

Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 04:10:41 -0800 (PST) To: jason@textfiles.com Subject: Concerning storis on your textfiles website Jason, I am the author of several stories on your textfiles website, probably a good 13 stories. Maybe it’s just meaningless text to you but it was a lot of hard work on my part. I notice that […]

Creative Commons and The Money —

OK, so everyone wants to know how I’ve made out so far with my whole releasing the BBS Documentary as a Creative Commons thing. And by “made out”, they mean of course “made money”. As in “Did you make any? Or were you ravaged like a mid 1990s FTP site with a Lucasarts Game uploaded […]

Vintage Computer Festival —

Before I mention next weekend, let me just say that about 200 people have already signed up for a “let me know when you’re working on GET LAMP and when it’s available” list. That was within a few days of announcement. I’ve also been contacted by roughly two dozen people who worked in text adventures […]

There is a Shiny Brass Lamp nearby —

I’ve been coy enough for too long. The next documentary I am working on is about Text Adventures, or Interactive Fiction. It is called “Get Lamp”. It has a introductory website (GETLAMP.COM) and I’ve been noodling with it for about 3 years. I got serious about it in June and have been spending significant time […]

Hungry —

I think when I first starting doing this weblog after my BoingBoing stint, I was going to focus my efforts on doing just massive essays on aspects of digital history… basically having a kind of boiler where I would throw out stuff that didn’t have any other place to discuss it. A lab, if you […]

Lord British in Space: A pledge —

It may not be known by many, but Richard Garriott/Lord British, creator of the Ultima series of role-playing games, has also been a fundamental part of an organization called Space Adventures. This organization was what interacted with the Russian space agencies to make Space Tourism a reality, where private citizens could experience the incredible wonder […]

The Future of Pinball —

I have forgotten how I initially heard about this documentary, but Greg Maletic has been working for a number of years on a film about the last gasp of Williams Pinball, the Pinball 2000 system. His film The Future of Pinball is very nearly finished. He was kind enough to send me a DVD of […]