Jason Scott's Weblog
My great pal Eric Drysdale sent out one last note to a set of friends about an event he thought that set would enjoy, and I am extremely lucky to be included in that set. Eric has a beautiful and exquisite comedic sense, an opinion I have that is borne out by his legacy of [ ]
Just a little over ten years ago, I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars [ ]
Sometimes I think about the person who had apparently binge-watched a pile of my presentations, looked at a couple that had been more recent, and announced that while they loved my work, it was a sad thing to consider how I was slowing down how my energy wasn t reflected like it used to be, [ ]
I attended INIT HELLO over the past weekend, and had a very good time. Located near Baltimore and spanning 2 days, the event was an Apple II themed potluck and contained about 50 people using said machines, doing workshops and giving a smattering of presentations. I ran the streaming/recording machine and even got a chance [ ]
This first paragraph is a paradox. I want you to go to a funding campaign and click on a button and support a project. But the project is one that expects you to be the kind of person who loves reading. I personally think there might be a slight amount of people who don t have [ ]
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe [ ]
Imagine, if you will, a vast river. It flows fast, so fast that when you look away and look back it s in many ways an entirely different river, not just a slightly different one. It used to be blue with an occasional brown or black. Nowadays, it s basically brown and black and a signficant amount [ ]
Kerfuffles are Kerfuffles. Causing one recently, with its particularly low-stakes aspects (what s done is done, no actions appear to be planned, I m already doing things differently, etc.) allowed me to at least re-visit a policy I ve been somewhat silently instituting for years. I block. I block frequently, quickly, and across every single medium that consitutes [ ]
As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the situation or the context, I figured it was worth writing a few quick addendums. Naturally, as is the case when [ ]
I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right. Years ago, clearing out the Information Cube, I donated its contents to roughly 10 organizations, carefully splitting things up for the best home, [ ]
Imagine an epic of nine years having a happy ending. I ve written so much about what is now called the Manuals Plus Collection. Let s go find those: If you don t want to walk those, I ll make it simple: I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out [ ]
There s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it, which can be summarized as this magazine got to be very large, very extensive, and probably served as the [ ]
I m about to write an essay that will lead to mass misinterpretation or out of context quoting, and before I get into that situation (intentionally), I have to create this entire sidebar to talk about a social construct I ve observed over the years. I ve spoken elsewhere about the Inside Out, but this is a different [ ]
I chose the life, it didn t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the one standing at the death of all things, and while it means a lot of moments of rescue [ ]
4am doesn t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk system worked, how it could be manipulated, and then, ultimately, how legions of companies and individuals used those manipulations to protect commercial [ ]
The reason I m doing a bunch of entries around the theme of A couple people asked, so here s a long and drawn-out answer that touches on a host of considerations is because the era of I am on multiple platforms that harvest my low-level brainwaves and let me make two-sentence jabs masquerading as insight is [ ]
The last entry garnered an awful lot of attention. While I would normally write in such a way as to move around between unrelated subjects, sometimes I m backed into a corner to do a follow-up or second part; the amount of people who have wandered into my field of vision to ask me for deep [ ]
Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you do and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don t make it the center of their lives, your thing is already hopelessly complicated and gaining enough of a foothold to feign interest is olympic-level effort. For people who do [ ]
Carcinization is the tendency of reality to keep making things into Crabs or Crab-like creatures. (De-Carcinization is when it goes the other way, and in fact there s evidence of oscillation between the two states.) It s the sort of thing that sounds fantastically interesting, the shallow end of the thinking pool, but then leaves you confused [ ]
OK, let s bring this thing back. Talk to you soon.