ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

All Rights Reserved without Prejudice —

As might be expected, running a high-profile site like textfiles.com earns me a lot of grief and attacks from a number of quarters, legitimate and not so legitimate. It’s not a big deal, usually, just the price of existing in such a networked world. The most common reason is that in the course of adding […]

A Place Within The Company —

One of the nice benefits of studying a lot of history is that you start to see inevitable trends and patterns going across decades or centuries. This is in many ways comforting, because instead of feeling sad and forlorn that an apparently unique situation has passed, you know it will likely happen again. One such […]

A Spate of Crowd Surfing —

I believe I have found my rhythm with this website; I am probably going to post some speculation or concept every few weeks, expounding greatly upon it, and then move on to another subject entirely. I will likely continue to refrain from political discusions, because I consider them banal and irrelevant to what textfiles.com is […]

An Endless Conversation —

I am recently back from a 9-day trip through the Midwest (Midwest being defined as Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas). I have made the personal discovery that I can drive roughly 350 miles a day alone before I start to encounter “problems”. Most of these problems involve potentially running off the road […]

The 21st Century Sysop —

I am a very big fan of “answering natural questions”, that is, as you take actions and do projects, people’s minds naturally gravitate towards information holes in your work and want them filled. They see artwork you drew and want to know what you used to do it. They hear you built a car that […]

Archiving Into the Infinite —

Snowed in by a blizzard (except for the part where I happily did donuts in a nearby parking lot), I focused some effort on sorting the office in my home, where most of my artifacts and papers are located. When I moved into this office about a year ago, I ended up moving wholecloth my […]

North, North, Get Lamp, West, Jump —

It’s been a while since I’ve added any major amount of vintage textfiles to the main site. When people send me their own creations, I quickly add them to the uploads section; that works out to maybe one or two files a week. But I’m happy to say I added over 120 new adventure walkthrough […]

Candy Colored Promises —

While I’m a person who despises intrusive and unwarranted advertising in previously clean and ad-free spaces (a concept best typified by urinal ads), that doesn’t necessarily mean I hate every single last aspect of marketing. Just most of it. Specifically, when a company or entity designs a product or service and, instead of just shoving […]

No Calls, Please —

I could tell by the phone number on my caller ID (217) that I probably didn’t know who this was. 217, that’s Illinois. Probably one of the usual telemarketing calls that want to offer me telecommunication services or reams of copy paper for my (non-existent) business. All of my domains basically point to the same […]

Room With an Interview —

The following is an interview conducted over e-mail with me by APC Magazine, a technology-based website and print magazine in Australia. Since this website gets a few hundred people a week and the print magazine gets many tens of thousands, I see no issue with posting it here as well. If you live in Australia, […]