Jason Scott's Weblog
It is a surreal feeling, having pushed a rock up a hill for a very long time, to find the load suddenly lighter. In fact, as you consider it, the rock is not just getting lighter, but is possibly moving on its own. At that point, it will dawn on you that you have in […]
I thought I’d mention a few documentaries I’m aware of that are either out or coming out, since I know that I would appreciate the same in their shoes. Time will tell if my release date (which is the end of this year) will coincide with theirs. It nearly goes without saying that I intend […]
The talk I gave at the Fifth HOPE Conference over the weekend is now available online. “Saving Digital History, a Quick and Dirty Guide” is an overview of the issues and perspectives in collecting digital artifacts, an explanation of how integrity and perfection are not always salient attributes, and a good heaping bucket of odd […]
Bob Bemer has died of Cancer. We never talked and I never met him.
I am happy to announce that I have had talks accepted at both the upcoming HOPE and DEFCON conferences. If you wanted to meet me, this is the best time to do it. If you’ve already met me, this is a great way to do it again. CAPTURING DIGITAL HISTORY: A Quick and Dirty Guide […]
Like a lot of filmmakers, I have fallen into that “no new news” hole that leaves the waiting public in the dark while no progress or information comes leaking out. Unlike a lot of them, I will try to explain why that is. For the last 3 months, I have basically been doing the clip […]
It seemed like a good idea at the time. As I was collecting textfiles and other artifacts from the BBS era and beyond, I started to go after the logical next step: audio recordings and “art scene” creations. In the case of audio, it started with conferences from the 1990s and voicemail recordings, but it […]
I’ve been watching an awful lot of documentaries for the past couple of years, mostly out of a self-interest, but also because I tend to like them. I especially like documentaries where the subject matter is not so self-evident, like people who play lots of online games or The Fisher-Price Pixelvision Camera or people who […]
“Bottom line, I made a mistake: I thought you were approaching this BBS documentary project as a scholar and a historian would. In my own work I’ve found that sometimes the most interesting threads uncovered in any history are not the obvious ones that everybody knows about, but the non-obvious ones, the exceptions to the […]
Imagine my surprise when I found the following auctions up on Ebay (they’ll disappear soon, like all truly fly-by-night operations and deals): Old School BBS Files Volume 1 (15,000+ files) Old School BBS Files Volume 2 (25,000 files) Old School BBS Files All (52,000+ files) Essentially, they’re selling a copy of textfiles.com for somewhere between […]