ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

Announcing: Blockparty! —

The summary is this: I am co-hosting a demoparty called BLOCKPARTY in Cleveland, Ohio at the end of April 2007. It will be an awful lot of fun and you should strongly consider attending. The website contains all the details you need. The rest of this entry are my thoughts on this project, what the […]

Five Wikipedia Predictions: A New Year —

OK! Back in February of 2006 I created an entry about five predictions I had for Wikipedia before the end of the year. It’s January 1st, and let’s see how I did. The theme of the outcomes is “depending how you look at it”. While it’d be nice to claim I totally nailed things, I […]

Housecleaning —

Here are some one-offs before the end of the year, for ideas or stuff that just doesn’t add up to a single entry. (In case anyone notices, I take the policy on here that I never post more than once a day, and I try to make each entry a complete self-contained idea, and worth […]

Printout —

Sometimes, when I’m feeling down or depressed, I cheer myself up the way that most people would: by scanning in 20-year-old dot-matrix printouts, proofreading the resulting textfile for accuracy to the original, and then posting it for the world. When I was calling BBSes in the early 1980s, I sometimes would print out the stuff […]

Todd “Ship” Shapiro —

I tried to use other means, but the name is in too much use and database searches don’t really help me lock things down. So here we go. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that I am a Hell Roommate. Within a short time you figure out that you made a really bad mistake renting […]

The Guide —

The more I collect stuff, and at this point I am collecting a virtual tidal wave of stuff, the more I am realizing how important the role of a guide is. There are a lot of good people in this world, doing a lot of good work collecting stuff. And by “a lot”, I mean […]

The Phone Stories: THE OFFICE —

Like any relatively sketchy activity, you learn “the rules” either by osmosis, logic, or the hard way. Your buddies involved in the same stuff as you will happily give you helpful advice, but they’re often just grasping into the same darkness as you. Such was the case with Phone Phreaking, which required the use of […]

Mythapedia —

I spent a week in London at the beginning of this month. This contributed to lack of updates here and a few other things being pushed temporarily aside. But I’m back, I took a lot of photos, and I had a very good time. I never left the confines of London, so I don’t consider […]

The Phone Stories: VOICEMAIL —

Like a lot of teenagers, I had voicemail. That is, like a lot of teenagers now. But I had voicemail in 1984. This came about because a kind soul posted a phone number to a voice mail system in Washington DC. I knew it was Washington DC because the area code was 202 and by […]

The Big Picture —

Some time ago, I talked about a theater on the way out, in an entry called The Little Theater. I talked about how they didn’t own their property, didn’t have a lobby to speak of, had basically taken the idea they were a utility and then turned around and demanded a million dollars from the […]