Jason Scott's Weblog
This essay is going to make a bizzare sort of logic, but not the kind of logic most people like in an essay. Sorry about that; this is how my brain works. The catalyst for this comes from two different articles, one about Interactive Fiction and one about Filmmaking. Since I happen to be making […]
In case some of you are wondering, I am in fact adding new BBS Documentary raw footage to archive.org. It just takes a little time because I have to go over the recorded hour, make sure there’s nothing too actionable or problematic in the footage (for the interviewee’s protection, and mine), and then generate the […]
I’m often asked about other possible subjects a film-savvy technical historian guy might cover. I get a good amount of mail and conversation with this question, and the suggestions generally fall into a bunch of what-you-might-expect standards. One which people ask me a lot about is, “Why don’t you do a documentary about virus writers […]
Back in October 2004, I wrote a review of the Last Starfighter musical, raving about how much I enjoyed it. My positive review, coupled with others, opened doors for those guys. They wrote me and thanked me and sent me a copy of the soundtrack they’d recorded as a demo, a precious gift. Well, they’ve […]
As promised, I went out and rented a U-Matic tape deck. One day, $100. I hooked it up through my DV-deck (this converts it over to a digital stream) and then dropped it onto a hard drive. Total time to transfer all thirteen 20-minute tapes: about 5 hours. Total space: 52 gigabytes. Of course I […]
I had a great time at the Vintage Computer Festival. My photographs of the event are here. You don’t know old-school until you’re playing a copy of Spacewar on a vintage PDP-1.. against the creator of Spacewar. Meeting Steven Wozniak again was also great. Actually, there’s so many great memories, I’ll have to go into […]
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 04:10:41 -0800 (PST) To: jason@textfiles.com Subject: Concerning storis on your textfiles website Jason, I am the author of several stories on your textfiles website, probably a good 13 stories. Maybe it’s just meaningless text to you but it was a lot of hard work on my part. I notice that […]
OK, so everyone wants to know how I’ve made out so far with my whole releasing the BBS Documentary as a Creative Commons thing. And by “made out”, they mean of course “made money”. As in “Did you make any? Or were you ravaged like a mid 1990s FTP site with a Lucasarts Game uploaded […]
Before I mention next weekend, let me just say that about 200 people have already signed up for a “let me know when you’re working on GET LAMP and when it’s available” list. That was within a few days of announcement. I’ve also been contacted by roughly two dozen people who worked in text adventures […]
I’ve been coy enough for too long. The next documentary I am working on is about Text Adventures, or Interactive Fiction. It is called “Get Lamp”. It has a introductory website (GETLAMP.COM) and I’ve been noodling with it for about 3 years. I got serious about it in June and have been spending significant time […]