Jason Scott's Weblog
I am happy to announce that I have had talks accepted at both the upcoming HOPE and DEFCON conferences. If you wanted to meet me, this is the best time to do it. If you’ve already met me, this is a great way to do it again. CAPTURING DIGITAL HISTORY: A Quick and Dirty Guide […]
Like a lot of filmmakers, I have fallen into that “no new news” hole that leaves the waiting public in the dark while no progress or information comes leaking out. Unlike a lot of them, I will try to explain why that is. For the last 3 months, I have basically been doing the clip […]
It seemed like a good idea at the time. As I was collecting textfiles and other artifacts from the BBS era and beyond, I started to go after the logical next step: audio recordings and “art scene” creations. In the case of audio, it started with conferences from the 1990s and voicemail recordings, but it […]
I’ve been watching an awful lot of documentaries for the past couple of years, mostly out of a self-interest, but also because I tend to like them. I especially like documentaries where the subject matter is not so self-evident, like people who play lots of online games or The Fisher-Price Pixelvision Camera or people who […]
“Bottom line, I made a mistake: I thought you were approaching this BBS documentary project as a scholar and a historian would. In my own work I’ve found that sometimes the most interesting threads uncovered in any history are not the obvious ones that everybody knows about, but the non-obvious ones, the exceptions to the […]
Imagine my surprise when I found the following auctions up on Ebay (they’ll disappear soon, like all truly fly-by-night operations and deals): Old School BBS Files Volume 1 (15,000+ files) Old School BBS Files Volume 2 (25,000 files) Old School BBS Files All (52,000+ files) Essentially, they’re selling a copy of textfiles.com for somewhere between […]
It was inevitable that the BBS Documentary would need a sizeable appendix of information and related subjects that came up during the production but likely won’t be in the final “films”. Either I won’t have interviews to accompany them, or they’re too hard to get right, or another reason. As a result, there’s now a […]
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 11:39:25 -0500 From: “dC :: Contact Desk” To: ascii@textfiles.com Subject: Good of History? Stupid and BORING Mr. Scott: I was recently forwarded a link to https://ascii.textfiles.com/ and a particular article was brought to my attention. First and foremost, I would like to apologize for the rather unsettling approach by one […]
Sketch> Hello! tuxie> oO Sketch> Is someone who runs depthcore here? depthCORE> Hello. Sketch> Hello! Sketch> I run a site called artscene.textfiles.com. I work with Rad Man of ACiD and a few other folks and try to collect together as many “art packs” as I can, as well as other art scenes. Is there any […]
This essay is not much about textfiles at all, though perhaps it’s entirely about textfiles. My work on my sites and documentary stem from several major drives: The desire to save a history I’m afraid is disappearing, the need to explain this history to folks who did not live through or personally experience the events […]