ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Memories of a Scoundrel —

While I’m mucking about in Napster-era land, I did want to harken back and give some regard to a little program that popped up in the middle of the peer-to-peer boom times that really got my attention. It was called Scoundrel, and at the time, it really opened my eyes to where things were going. […]

The Decade Cometh —

In October of 2008, I will celebrate ten years of running textfiles.com. I am actually at a loss of how to exactly mark that occasion. A party? A little badge-y do-dad on the website? Finally get the torrent going? A web redesign? A new hat? I’m sure no matter what I’ll have a long, drawn-out […]

Napster: Did You Forget? —

I figured I’d take a moment for this little reminder. Napster was great. My friend Deth Veggie of Cult of the Dead cow pinged me in an e-mail and told me I had to download this Napster thing and try it out. This was 1999, when it wasn’t all that known. I thought it was […]

CPU Not Required: Making Demos with FPGAs —

Jeri Ellsworth is one of those people who shouldn’t exist. She has an amazing life story, dropping out of high school because of the success of her racecar fabrication business, which was followed by a successful computer store business, and then she made the logical jump: learn chip fabrication and low-level assembly coding. From this […]

Sorry, Fired. —

There was a new version of this weblog. It is gone now. I am back at my old one. I tried to upgrade. It was painful, obtuse, silly, required me to spend 3 hours writing rewrite rules, and then presented me with dogshit. I have lost a day of productivity, and I am seething at […]

Blockparty: 4k Music —

At the first Blockparty, BarZoule was scheduled to come and speak with his cohorts in Northern Dragons about 4k demos. He was scheduled for a time and then had to pull out at the last moment; another speaker filled his place. This year, BarZoule (who also won the Demo competition for 2008) offered to make […]

Suicidal —

I’m like everyone else; put enough crushing torrents of sorrowful actions and forces onto me, and my mind muses that perhaps there’s an easier way out of it all. Granted, it’s obviously not been successful and I have no intentions of it being successful, but it does happen, even to me. I figured I’d mention […]

A Demo Event of Serious Consequence —

Blockparty 2008 went so well, I’m going to spend an awful lot of time talking about it. I thought we couldn’t easily top last year on so many fronts and yet we did. There is a lot of media out there and more coming, so let me quickly dump some links on you to get […]

Twilight of the Area Code Master —

We know (or at least I hope we do) that skills once considered vital will eventually fall out of favor. Stuff that you could do well, maybe better than anyone you knew, eventually becomes something that has no opportunity for any use. Heartbreaking, I know. What’s worse is when it’s less a case of you […]

FORUM REFEREE! —

For reasons that nobody cares about, I was sent two companion threads, one closed and the other basically so, regarding the release of an Atari 2600 cartridge. This is interesting in itself to some people, but in fact I’m more fascinated by the body of it and where things went wrong. And things did go […]