Jason Scott's Weblog
There was a joker in every crowd. I use the word “joker” because the jokers traditionally have thin defensive skin and calling them what they are instead of Jokers gets that hurt look I don’t need on a night of triumph. All the nights were nights of triumph on the JET LAMP tour, by the […]
It has been an interesting few days. Creating the archive of Geocities content from the Archive Team’s collection took my machine roughly 10 days to compress. The resultant collection of .7z files is 642 gigabytes, expanding out to 909 gigabytes. Then I began creating the actual .torrent file, which is merely a collection of pointers […]
I have a number of scans running in RSS feeds to let me know about stuff related to my movies, projects, and people chit-chatting about me. I also have a scan watching for the words “BBS” and “Bulletin” in them, which more often than not scoop up references to “Bulletin Board Systems”. It does a […]
The stack of huge boxes on my door containing this material heralded an important milestone in my life: my first assignment as a professional historian/archivist. From the official announcement: To celebrate ‘GDC 25’, the conference organizers have appointed an official historian for the show in the form of noted technology archivist Jason Scott, known for […]
Sometimes, when you’re an archivist of my stripe, your tools don’t just include computers – sometimes they include something like this: And really, you better have a truck when you drive down to the local post office with your “fuck if we’re going to deliver this” yellow slip and come up against this waiting pile: […]
Well, here we are on October 26th, 2010. Can it really be a year ago that Archive Team had dozens of people assaulting Yahoo’s servers desperately trying to save disappearing history? Well, let’s be frank — not disappearing history, but in fact history being actively and quickly destroyed on purpose. I mean, it’s not like […]
After roughly 4 years of work (2006-2010), GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventures, is complete. While I’ve been working on the documentary and its aftermath, this weblog has been dormant. While some use their weblogs as day to day updates and some use them to write small “let’s talk about this” paragraphs, usually with […]
So part of this is let you know of the PLATO 50th Anniversary Celebration at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It’s June 2-3rd. If you have the ability to get out there to it and you have the slightest interest in computer history, you will want to go to this. It all […]
The Information Cube, the new home of the TEXTFILES.COM Archives and a direct result of the Sabbatical funding I received last year, is coming along nicely. I learned a lot about what crates and storage boxes work and do not work, I can say that – I’ve found which collapse under their own weight, which […]
Just worked a little on one of those “in the attic” projects – adding interviewees to the cast list for the BBS Documentary IMDB Entry. If you’ve never worked with IMDB’s interface for adding or correcting details, it’s very weird to say the least. And if you’re working in the world of Wikis and think […]