Jason Scott's Weblog
I got another nice letter today along the lines of “I’m sorry to bother you… oh god, don’t hit me… please, what’s going on with CD.TEXTFILES.COM?” Sure, there’s a lot of people who write to me like I’m the Super and they’re getting no heat, but others write with an overarching deference and politeness. So […]
There’s an article in the Autumn edition of 2600 called “Where have all the Philes Gone?” It’s horrible. I’m sorry I only became aware of it recently; I don’t read 2600 much anymore. I don’t understand why 2600 doesn’t have a PDF version of itself available for a subscription fee or otherwise downloadable. I wish […]
I’m knocking the weblog schedule back from six days a week to five, basically posting on weekdays, with the occasional huge honker on the weekend if something important comes up. I’m having trouble maintaining that jet-setting, here-and-there lifestyle of a computer historian and dependably posting entries on the day they were written. Twice I’ve had […]
I think of it, and I laugh. I consider the implications, and I laugh harder. It’s a deep laugh, the laugh of realizing that you locked your lockpicking set in your car along with your keys. The laugh of the fact that I spent $70 on a digital sundial. And the laugh of remembering that […]
It occurred to me to mention a couple more things about this video shoot from the previous entry. People who are shooting stuff might make assumptions about how I did it, and those assumptions might be quite wrong because I didn’t give information out. So, here we go. The video cost me roughly $50 to […]
The rise of “post mortems” in relation to games and other software projects is kind of interesting; it has rarely been the case that groups would trumpet what they did wrong or would want to change about something they just finished before. I suspect that for some it’s a case of being able to exorcise […]
Back in the 1980s, there’s an event that occurred that is worthwhile to study, mostly because of the parallels to issues that are hitting us now. It’s relatively obscure (except of course to those who lived directly in it) and that’s a shame, because it has lessons to teach. One of the inevitable things that […]
I am not exaggerating when I say that I could not imagine Blockparty going better than it did. Oh, sure, I could make things up and say that it didn’t have a air castle or funhouse in the parking lot, or I could complain there was no free sushi cart in the hallway with a […]
I wrote this letter earlier this year regarding a debate whether to put up a collection of talks up as one large file directory on bittorrent, or have separate “torrents” for each individual talk. I favored one large file directory, and went entirely overboard explaining why. I figured it might have some relevance for others […]
At a demoparty, there is often what’s called a “Wildcard” or “Wild” competition, where entrants can basically throw in anything they want to and compete for prizes. It sounds free-form, because it is. The entry can be a movie, a performance, a program, you name it, the sky’s the limit. They can get pretty out […]