ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

The Handheld 21st Century —

For years, my cell phone was a variation of a Motorola contractor’s phone. This was the most basic, but tough-built phone in the Motorola line, mostly intended to be on construction sites and in the hands of very rough-handling computer historians. The most recent one of those I owned was a i530. An i530 looks […]

Transparent Paper: PAPER.TEXTFILES.COM —

For fun, let’s include everyone in on a little project of mine. Unlike Archive Team, I’m not actively seeking help on it for the moment, just doing some initial work and including you in on it. As part of my mission/life/hobby, I find myself often being sent collections of magazines, catalogs, and other paper that […]

A DAK Catalog Showdown? —

To commemorate (or at least reference) the subject I’m talking about (the DAK Catalog), I’m going to write in the style of the catalog itself. YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME I often get shipments of old magazines, catalogs, flyers and the like from people giving up collections they no longer want to care for […]

Geocities: Why Hello, Everybody —

Well, hasn’t it been a fascinating few days indeed. Remember that, late last week, this project wasn’t even on the horizon. I mean, Archive Team was, and I had mechanisms and structure in place to call out to people, but there was no indication that Geocities was experiencing any problems or future changes. So this […]

Sniper Spree —

And now, a quick interlude. Some quick ruminations on the meaning of a contest-winning best-of-sniper-shots-in-Halo video I’ve watched a couple times recently. I am sure that for some people, “Jason And Halo” has become that saddest of weblog tropes, the Thing That The Weblogger Keeps Going Back To That We Got The Point Already Thanks. […]

Geocities: Lessons So Far —

The Geocities-is-going-away thing broke wide a short while ago. The “Jason is Saving Geocities” thing is breaking wider by the day, so I guess we need an update. After my initial call-out, a nice selection of folks showed up to the Archive Team IRC channel, ranging from the offering of bandwidth and disk space or […]

Geocities —

So Yahoo, cowards that they are, announced in the most quiet and subtle manner possible that they were shutting down Geocities, the nearly 20-years-old hosting service and site that has been home to untold millions over the years. I suppose I should be flattered that well over two dozen people have contacted me to ask, […]

Notacon 6 and Blockparty 3 —

[flickrset id=”72157617027312199″ thumbnail=”square”] I’ve been to all six Notacons and I’ve co-run all three Blockparties. This year, things moved to a new hotel and while the new hotel had some oddities and rough patches, it was so much better a place as to be a whole new event. And for Blockparty itself, my attempt to […]

The Delight of Fuzzy Memory —

Back in the mid 1990s, when the Emulation Craze really kicked in and before MAME flattened the playing field once and for all, we had a lot of emulators out there. Some were single-purpose: they emulated a single video game, and generally very well. Others were multi-machine, usually focusing on a set of games that […]

The Presentation Presentation —

The other main “guy on stage in a room addressing an audience” presentation I did at Notacon this past weekend was a little stranger. But maybe you’ll dig it. (Here’s a link to the page if the embedded player doesn’t work.) Here’s how it came about. I’ve attended a lot of presentations, watched them online […]