Jason Scott's Weblog
In the BBS Documentary, I dedicated an entire episode to the Artscene, the massive collection of groups doing ANSI artwork for bulletin board systems. I interviewed members of iCE and ACiD (and a bunch of others) and showed both the breathtaking variety of art they’d make, the political battles over the membership and releases, and […]
OK, so here’s the high-level report: We Saved Geocities! Obviously, this needs a truckload of qualifications, so let’s go over them immediately. First of all “We” is not just Archive Team, badass archivist motherfuckers that we are. While probably 30-40 people from around the world stopped in on the Archive Team tent at the Geocitiesdownloadapalooza, […]
I am sure we all laughed at the end, there, when one of the members of Archive Team, slaving like the rest of us to yank data out, suggested a link to a Geocities page with a MIDI of “The Final Countdown” by Europe. The perfect tinny music to blast out of the speakers as […]
You’re stupid and I hate you. I haven’t even met you, don’t even know where you are or what else you do, and I hate you. It’s 7 in the morning. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping lately. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping for months. I’ve been working on backing […]
All my favorite are the ideas that terrify me. Sometimes the terrifying idea is understandably terrifying – other times it’s just so many different ways of thinking about stuff that I’m lost in the possibilities. I think this is the second one. Basically, I’m reaching out to my fanbase and saying “Please help me work […]
This week’s sent-in cool stuff came from Steve Ross, who sent me a box of IBM Binders. Sometimes (OK, fine, often) I get to indulge in acquiring material that is personally meaningful to me. In the case of IBM binders, it’s one of those connections that, honestly, I find hard to explain but it’s overpowering. […]
The presentation I gave at Arse Elektronika 2009, entitled “The Atomic Level of Porn”, has been edited and uploaded by the very talented Eddie Codel, who utilized slides I sent him with a well-mic’d, well-constructed set of footage to make a superior audio-visual product. The talk is mostly an attempt to show the various ways […]
Well, well, well. So you might have missed this piece of news, but this past week, if you owned a phone branded as a T-Mobile Sidekick, which itself was based on original work of the Danger Hiptop, then your phone’s data was all lost and if you power-cycle your phone, you will lose all your […]
I got mail from someone who saw I took in all those other magazines and books. “Hey, we’re getting rid of a bunch of magazines and books. Do you want them?” “Sure,” I said, “I’ll take it. Without question. I’ll pay for postage.” “Great.” So a little while and hundreds of dollars in postage later, […]
I drove 400 miles to interview Jack Rickard for my documentary, and I’d have done twice that. Jack was the publisher of Boardwatch magazine, for years the bible of bulletin board system sysops and the central watering hole of information and updates of interest to both BBSes and people starting to consider themselves ISPs. I […]