Jason Scott's Weblog
I’m probably going to regret posting this, but I deal mostly in regret and nostalgia daily, so it’ll all be just fine. The Thing is now everywhere online. It’s absorbing everyone, every place people begin to talk about any aspect of people. I can’t think of a social interaction space of any part where it’s currently […]
Back in 2012, I wrote an entry called 8-Bit Generation: Missing in Action, in which I described and lamented a seemingly lost and impeccably filmed documentary called The 8-Bit Generation. And on September 13th, 2014, on my 44th birthday, I was able to show an audience footage from the series, along with interviewing the producer […]
In 2009, I proposed the idea that rapidly-shutting-down websites should be quickly downloaded and saved by a fast acting and future-minded group of web archivists. I called them the A-Team, or Archive Team, and said they’d be the last resort for online history that was otherwise doomed. An unbelievably huge amount of web history had […]
Every time I’ve spoken at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, I’ve always had someone else arranging all the details, including the panel and the attendant responsibilities of getting it to pass muster. This time, however, I’ve put together something neat, and the process needs, nay, requires you to really get out there […]
This is another call for help with JSMESS. I promise you that I will get back to more general computer history soon, but this project is really important and changing the entire paradigm of how software is presented is pretty high up the list right now. I also know this description of the issue and […]
The Screen Shotgun, as mentioned before, is continuing its never-ending quest to play tens of thousands of games and programs, take screenshots, and upload them into the Internet Archive. Like any of these tinker-y projects, I’ve written a bunch of additional support, error checking, and what have you to the process, so that it can […]
In some circles, I’m known as the guy who wrote Fuck the Cloud. Yet as of this past weekend, I have three Amazon EC2 instances doing massive amounts of screenshots of ZX Spectrum programs (thousands so far) using the Screen Shotgun. Nobody has specifically come after me about this, but I figured I’d get out ahead of […]
UPDATE: I’m happy to say a developer has come forward and we’re out of the woods on sound. It’s not perfect, but the web audio API isn’t perfect and we’re much better armed for interacting with it now. Thanks, everyone. Spread this one far and wide. It’s rare I get anything close to desperate, but […]
This has been years in the making. When my living space looked like this photo. it was just vaguely problematic. Considering what I do and what is specifically needed day to day, this project and storage situation was an issue. But that was a while ago. Now we’re at this: See, that’s seriously out of […]
The MindCandy series got me started on this whole “get it down in a movie” trip. Created with a love of the demoscene, a dedication to capturing the demos as accurately as possible, and most importantly explaining the entire process from beginning to end, MindCandy was a refreshing breath of air. DVDs, which were still relatively […]