ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

Goodbye, Milky —

Without a doubt, the absolute worst way to find out about someone’s death is through referrer logs. Among the people I interviewed for the documentary were a couple in Toronto, who for the purposes of identification were called “Milky and Liz”. We talked about diversi-dials (ddials), early BBS culture, BBS meets, and a whole other […]

Kick My Ass —

I am very sad today. I have two big piles in my life: unfinished projects to do, and unfinished media to absorb. The piles are huge, because I acquire a lot of stuff and I get a lot of ideas. One of the pieces in the unfinished project is a novel. I’ve had this novel […]

The Documentary was SO worth making. —

Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:29:46 -0400 To: director@bbsdocumentary.com Subject: Okay, I admit it! Jason, I’d seen your BBS documentary mentioned on Slashdot in the past, and after a recent post about it, I decided to go to your site to see about purchasing it. After all, I spent about a decade of my life […]

Rumspringa —

I don’t know why it took me so long to finally announce this idea; I had it back in June but then life got a little busy. Textfiles.com gets a lot of visitors. A LOT. Hundreds of thousands. And I get a lot of nice mail from a lot of people. Also, I like to […]

The BBS Documentary Interview Collection —

Well, Waxy showed his usual talent for sniffing out dropped hints and figured out that I referenced the BBS Documentary raw footage going onto archive.org over time. Since that little kitty’s out of the box, let me give clarifications. I’m actually more concerned about releasing raw footage while the documentary is in “sales cycle” than […]

Statement of Work —

I was browsing around for mentions of the documentary, and found a nice lively discussion about the documentary’s scope and range on a usenet newsgroup, alt.bbs.synchronet. Here’s the thread I found. It’s an interesting one, because it kind of captures everything that I’ve really been proud of as well as most everything I’ve been criticized […]

Time Served —

Throughout the whole production, I was only kicked out of a house once. This is actually a very good ratio, considering the number of people, range of locations, and seat-of-the-pants methods I often employed throughout the filming. I would occasionally find myself in a place, say, Washington DC, get a call and learn that my […]

Bovine Ignition Systems —

The production company that made the BBS Documentary is called “Bovine Ignition Systems”. It’s a weird enough name that a couple people have actually stopped paypal orders and contacted me to verify that “Bovine Ignition Systems” is the company that they should be giving $50 to. The name dates back to 1985, when I was […]

The Right Audience (and the Sequel) —

This entry has a ramble factor of 8. Please use caution. I took an initial risk when I was plotting out this documentary and how I would approach it, and that was how “technical” the whole thing would get. When you do a documentary on a subject, there’s always a balancing act between making it […]