Jason Scott's Weblog
In October, Facebook made the announcement that you could finally export your information. Woo hoo! What’s interests me is less how Facebook implemented the exporting (spoiler alert: so-so) than the fact that they felt they need to do this. Why did they spontaneously decide to add exporting of any fashion? (If you want the clunky […]
OK, so CD.TEXTFILES.COM is such a wild, insane success that I’m starting to think I need mirrors. Right now, the data’s only in two locations, and I don’t like that. I’m going to make it three, shortly. With over 350gb of data in over 3.3 million files, it’s a lot of data. But what data! […]
OK, let’s begin by establishing some things. Currently, by the standards of independent (actually independent) filmmaking, I’m fucking Steven Spielberg. I’ve made two films, BBS and GET LAMP, which are not even films – one is a box-set miniseries and the other is actually three documentaries combined with a coin. They’re films++, a reflection of […]
I’ve gone on about how fantastic Jamie Zawinski’s chronicles of taking over and renovating the DNA Lounge are. Besides his unflinching of the ups and downs of renovating the club, and his deliciously nasty reaction to the status quo of licensing and politics surrounding entertainment in a city reknowned for being open-minded and supposedly free, […]
There was a joker in every crowd. I use the word “joker” because the jokers traditionally have thin defensive skin and calling them what they are instead of Jokers gets that hurt look I don’t need on a night of triumph. All the nights were nights of triumph on the JET LAMP tour, by the […]
It has been an interesting few days. Creating the archive of Geocities content from the Archive Team’s collection took my machine roughly 10 days to compress. The resultant collection of .7z files is 642 gigabytes, expanding out to 909 gigabytes. Then I began creating the actual .torrent file, which is merely a collection of pointers […]
I have a number of scans running in RSS feeds to let me know about stuff related to my movies, projects, and people chit-chatting about me. I also have a scan watching for the words “BBS” and “Bulletin” in them, which more often than not scoop up references to “Bulletin Board Systems”. It does a […]
The stack of huge boxes on my door containing this material heralded an important milestone in my life: my first assignment as a professional historian/archivist. From the official announcement: To celebrate ‘GDC 25’, the conference organizers have appointed an official historian for the show in the form of noted technology archivist Jason Scott, known for […]
Sometimes, when you’re an archivist of my stripe, your tools don’t just include computers – sometimes they include something like this: And really, you better have a truck when you drive down to the local post office with your “fuck if we’re going to deliver this” yellow slip and come up against this waiting pile: […]
Well, here we are on October 26th, 2010. Can it really be a year ago that Archive Team had dozens of people assaulting Yahoo’s servers desperately trying to save disappearing history? Well, let’s be frank — not disappearing history, but in fact history being actively and quickly destroyed on purpose. I mean, it’s not like […]