ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

CD.TEXTFILES.COM Needs Mirrors —

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! […]

Your Roger Corman Future —

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 […]

Flyer Archives —

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, […]

Chicks —

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 […]

A Torrent of Attention —

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 […]

Goodbye to VK7AX BBS —

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 […]

Historian!! —

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 […]

A Softwear Archive —

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: […]

Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent —

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 […]

You’re Stealing it Wrong —

This summer, for DEFCON 18, I gave a talk called “You’re Stealing it Wrong: 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles”.  The proposal was good enough that less than a few hours after I submitted it, Dark Tangent himself tweeted about it. That was enough pressure to ensure I had lots of backup material, lots of items […]