Jason Scott's Weblog
I get a lot of spam. I know that’s not exactly breaking news, but sometimes you really have to step back and look at a situation to realize just how entirely horrible things have become. It doesn’t help if you can remember when the situation just wasn’t the same within your lifetime, that you can […]
It’s worth it to talk just a little more about the Essjay Assery I talked about a couple days ago. A few things have shifted around, the usual “I guess that’s the end of the show, move along” crap is happening, and I wanted to get a few more things in before everything becomes “Ancient […]
I occasionally stumble over to Julien McArdle’s website, and specifically his weblog, to see what he’s up to. I had the pleasure of co-presenting a talk at the 2006 HOPE Conference, with the two of us talking about documentaries. I was particularly touched by all this because it was his idea to contact me in […]
Required warning: This is about Wikipedia. It’s been quite a week to be a Wikipedia critic. The Wikicritic market, previously one of a few concerned voices drowned out by the tidal din of Wiki-love-chants, is now itself flooded with me-toos. I can’t go anywhere without hearing about this “controversy” that is bouncing around places that […]
My cubicle at work is completely bare except for a single quote hung on the wall next to the computer. A lot of people have heard this quote, but I don’t mind being yet another person quoting it, just in case you haven’t. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points […]
As far as I can tell, I am the world expert on dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. A statement sandbagged with such hubris has to come with some caveats, of course. Anybody can kick my ass with minutiae about the specific geographically-centered “scenes” they were part of for months or years. Employees of certain BBS-oriented companies […]
As part of the Wozipedia project, I decided I was going to take advantage of various collected Wozniak speeches and presentations he’s made over the years, letting him speak in his own words instead of paraphrasing him. When left alone (and given lots of time), Wozniak spins amazing yarns. For reasons I still don’t quite […]
This week, I had had a pretty cool plan: Go to California, do an interview for GET LAMP, then go to Hawaii for a few days with family. This past Sunday, the day of my flight, I woke up with another kidney stone. Well, I should say I woke up from the extreme pain of […]
Last year, I got a sudden burst of referrer links to my Great Failure of Wikipedia speech. In fact, the links were all variant amounts of criticial attacks, some strong-willed, others mis-informed. I started to respond to a few until I realized that they were doing it for a class, a class in Blogging, actually. […]
Sometime in my later teens, after being raised on the “mean streets” of Bulletin Board Systems, ASCII Express lines, and the occasional Diversi-Dial, I got myself onto the Usenet posting boards. It was stunning to me, because I didn’t know people could write online like that. For a quick comparison of what I’m talking about, […]