ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The Secret Cost of the Database —

I made a discovery the hard way over the years, in the way one doesn’t like to make discoveries. That is, I made the finding that database maintenance is hard. Oh, sure, laugh at me and my vital announcement of a thing well known, but there’s a more sharp edge to the coin besides just […]

99% —

Going through the process of making a documentary a second time causes me to come face to face with a few situations I’d forgotten about. You tend to gloss over stuff, and forget some of the sharp edges. I guess it’s how we cope. Anyway, I have drives of footage, which include stuff that has […]

Silly Jim Leonard —

Oh, Trixter, you silly person. You work yourself up into such sadness while life has handed you nothing but jewels and treasure. You state dreams and projects you feel could not be finished, to feel like your life is going to be a series of incomplete projects choking your days and filling them with regrets. […]

Adventurespiele —

Hey, did you know I can speak German? Neither did I! “Ich habe vorher ein paar Jahre an einer Dokumentation uber Mailbox-Systeme (BBS) gearbeitet und als ich damit fertig war, merkte ich, dass ich viele Fahigkeiten aufgebaut hatte, die ich noch woanders einsetzen konnte.” OK, fine, I was translated from english answers I gave. That […]

The Quirks of Penguicon —

I was at Penguicon 6.0, which is the first time I attended it. Therefore anything I say is from the point of view from attending a mere 16.6% of all Penguicons. I was asked to speak about interactive fiction, and what the hey, I have to brush up on talking about this subject because I’m […]

Digger —

Truly, digger.org is the way it should be done. Celebrating ten years of effort, this website is dedicated to a relatively obscure game called Digger that came out for IBM PCs in 1983. I was one of the owners of this game, and absolutely loved the thing. A riff off of the arcade game Dig-Dug, […]

Quick Interview: Drive and Despair —

One of my fine users sent in the following four questions. I figured everybody had to hear my answers right now, so here you go. When you first started publishing, did you ever feel in moments that you had some trouble getting people to notice? Did that impact your feelings about your projects? If it […]

Goatse Metrics —

I was doing some chart work recently, and it reminded me I have the data for a year of goatse’ing people, along with pre-goatse logging as well. I decided it was time to run the numbers. Here’s some charts: The Goatse switch-out happened on January 1st, so we can see an immediate change in the […]

Uther – Net —

I love getting mail. I especially like getting mail of stuff I ordered some time ago that is being hand-crafted for me and has to be sent from other countries. That’s particularly enjoyable mail. Today’s mail provided me with a cute little device called the Uther Ethernet card. You are either going to be excited […]

More-iarty —

I forgot how the whole thing got started (I think it was a conversation, or maybe an e-mail) but I started helping some students at WPI (a nearby college) with interviews of historical video game and gaming figures. What this consisted of was having a few students over, talking about editing, showing how I think […]