Jason Scott's Weblog
My man “Flack” O’Hara and I were having a chat about this whole “Where Have All the Philez Gone?” thing I mentioned last week. He goaded me into writing a letter to 2600, so I did, which was generally a good thing (we’ll see if I get into HOPE in a year and a half) […]
Friends, both old and new, like to do the ol’ Wikicritic a favor by pointing out to him any little flame-up of wikipedia discussion that hits a prominent or not so prominent weblog or website or newspaper or the like. Almost none of these recent whorls of discussion expound on how great Wikipedia is; that’s […]
I don’t know why I care, but I do. The sudden web-mainstreaming of “LOLCATS”, or “Image Macros”, inevitably leads to a discussion of the genesis of this weird way or writing stuff, which leads to some mention of “Leetspeak”, which then collapses into a pile of speculative jelly as to where the hell all this […]
An interview conducted with an IF author put me in the Providence, RI area, 40 miles from home. While in the short term it might seem to be efficient and businesslike to zip in, do an interview, and drive back, the day was beautiful and Providence can be lovely if you squint. I ended up […]
I got another nice letter today along the lines of “I’m sorry to bother you… oh god, don’t hit me… please, what’s going on with CD.TEXTFILES.COM?” Sure, there’s a lot of people who write to me like I’m the Super and they’re getting no heat, but others write with an overarching deference and politeness. So […]
There’s an article in the Autumn edition of 2600 called “Where have all the Philes Gone?” It’s horrible. I’m sorry I only became aware of it recently; I don’t read 2600 much anymore. I don’t understand why 2600 doesn’t have a PDF version of itself available for a subscription fee or otherwise downloadable. I wish […]
I’m knocking the weblog schedule back from six days a week to five, basically posting on weekdays, with the occasional huge honker on the weekend if something important comes up. I’m having trouble maintaining that jet-setting, here-and-there lifestyle of a computer historian and dependably posting entries on the day they were written. Twice I’ve had […]
I think of it, and I laugh. I consider the implications, and I laugh harder. It’s a deep laugh, the laugh of realizing that you locked your lockpicking set in your car along with your keys. The laugh of the fact that I spent $70 on a digital sundial. And the laugh of remembering that […]
It occurred to me to mention a couple more things about this video shoot from the previous entry. People who are shooting stuff might make assumptions about how I did it, and those assumptions might be quite wrong because I didn’t give information out. So, here we go. The video cost me roughly $50 to […]
The rise of “post mortems” in relation to games and other software projects is kind of interesting; it has rarely been the case that groups would trumpet what they did wrong or would want to change about something they just finished before. I suspect that for some it’s a case of being able to exorcise […]