ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

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First! —

Well, probably not really the first, but a while ago I was informed that there was a BBS Documentary that came out before mine. (I thought I was the only one.) Of course, it’s 8 minutes long, interviewed about 6 people, and has music that sounds like you’re being offered real estate with no money […]

Demoscene Week: Link Buffet (Conclusion) —

I’ve been somewhat sparse with links for this week; mostly, I wanted to concentrate on the writing. Also, I’ve been very sparse with graphics; a lot of this is simply because once you scratch the surface of the Demoscene, graphics are absolutely everywhere, and I just wanted people to have the facts. A number of […]

Demoscene Week: Blockparty —

I’m actually kind of at a loss as to when the whole idea for running/co-running a demo party of my own came to me, but I was likely on the phone with RaD Man of ACiD, who I have the pleasure of chatting with frequently these past few years. We had a fast friendship after […]

Demoscene Week: The Countries —

For an environment that is so critically associated with computers and later networks of computers, and which many elements can be downloaded around the world (except for the aspects I mentioned yesterday), you would think that countries wouldn’t matter. But in the demoscene, they do. They do very much indeed. Demos and demoscene folks often […]

Demoscene Week: The Drama —

It’s too easy, when recounting the Demoscene and its history and motivations, to convince yourself or your audience of a clean-room version, where it’s all about the creations and the resulting programs, and little else; kind of like the image put on by game publishers. (It is here, where once it was not, and it […]

Demoscene Week: Going in Style —

In yesterday’s entry, I gave some background information on the genesis of Demo Parties (sometimes called just Demoparties or Parties), where you had a history of software pirates outdoing each other in introductory screens before pirated software, and these “intros” were then spun off on their own right, becoming sole productions that were then judged […]

Demoscene Week: Changing Everything —

I wasn’t there, but I was close. When the demogroup Farbrausch released FR-041 (“Debris”) at Breakpoint 2007, I was watching through the demoscene.tv stream and watched it completely own the Demo category, even with new productions by Andromeda and Synesthetics, to the great cries of “HUND! HUND!” throughout the Rundsporthalle. I wasn’t awake for the […]

Hark! Kibble! —

A lot of discussion has gone by about the website twitter, with the now-usual overloaded amount of meta-criticism, distaste, praise and pontification. Ostensibly this will be the case in the future for any website that claims to have come up with a new type of communication, or at least, a new interface to an old […]

Amateur Decade —

In the previous entry Amateur Night, I talked about websites that don’t want to think of themselves as websites, but little tiny kingdoms with special data that can be completely protected and uncopyable by massive “terms of service”. It occurs to me there’s a historical precedent for this on BBSes (and after a while, someone […]

Warning! Amateur Night! —

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