Jason Scott's Weblog
This essay is not much about textfiles at all, though perhaps it’s entirely about textfiles. My work on my sites and documentary stem from several major drives: The desire to save a history I’m afraid is disappearing, the need to explain this history to folks who did not live through or personally experience the events […]
In a move to allow people who are interested in my BBS Documentary to get news about it in a timely fashion without constantly hitting the website, I will be cross-posting news stories from the BBS Documentary site on this weblog. Updates happen once a month or less, so I don’t expect it to be […]
Sometimes, there are aspects of history that are so obscure, so unusual, that they are forgotten even by people who were a part of that history. In the sphere of technology, you will often have the case of people being faced with a problem so easily overcome in later years that the fact that the […]
As might be expected, running a high-profile site like textfiles.com earns me a lot of grief and attacks from a number of quarters, legitimate and not so legitimate. It’s not a big deal, usually, just the price of existing in such a networked world. The most common reason is that in the course of adding […]
One of the nice benefits of studying a lot of history is that you start to see inevitable trends and patterns going across decades or centuries. This is in many ways comforting, because instead of feeling sad and forlorn that an apparently unique situation has passed, you know it will likely happen again. One such […]
I believe I have found my rhythm with this website; I am probably going to post some speculation or concept every few weeks, expounding greatly upon it, and then move on to another subject entirely. I will likely continue to refrain from political discusions, because I consider them banal and irrelevant to what textfiles.com is […]
I am recently back from a 9-day trip through the Midwest (Midwest being defined as Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas). I have made the personal discovery that I can drive roughly 350 miles a day alone before I start to encounter “problems”. Most of these problems involve potentially running off the road […]
I am a very big fan of “answering natural questions”, that is, as you take actions and do projects, people’s minds naturally gravitate towards information holes in your work and want them filled. They see artwork you drew and want to know what you used to do it. They hear you built a car that […]
Snowed in by a blizzard (except for the part where I happily did donuts in a nearby parking lot), I focused some effort on sorting the office in my home, where most of my artifacts and papers are located. When I moved into this office about a year ago, I ended up moving wholecloth my […]
It’s been a while since I’ve added any major amount of vintage textfiles to the main site. When people send me their own creations, I quickly add them to the uploads section; that works out to maybe one or two files a week. But I’m happy to say I added over 120 new adventure walkthrough […]