Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It

Fishing, Night, Truck, Grandfather, Empty, Modem, Moments, Boards, Phones, Fear, Elation, Soul, Duality, Broken, DIscord, Heights, Memories, Places, Heart, Simple, Enjoyment. A rumination of the echoes of revolution, told from one person's life. Part 1 of 4.

The Transcription and Summarization Episode: LLMs, Modems, Magic, Technology, Infinite Toys, Change, Promises, Reality, Tascam, Amiga, Manuals, Summarization, Weird But Tireless, Always a Revolution. Some quick thoughts on the world of LLMs as they start entering my life (and many others) from the point of view of a half century of technology.

The UMATIC Gems Episode: A Small Hot Room, The Mechanisms, The Robots, 40-50 Years, Sony and From Another World, Tensions and Read Heads, Tapes and Decay, The Lifespan, The Future, The Joy of Saving, The Potentials and Possibilities, Mark Pines. A rumination on the UMATIC tape decks in my office, which are large, loud and hot.

The Bad Review Episode: 2 Stars Out of 5, Bad Cinematography and No Effort, The Timeline of the BBS Documentary, Choices Made, Experiences Lived, 10 to 15 Minutes, A Crew of One, The Unknown End, The Results, GET LAMP, Your Project's Future. A rumination on a 2/5 review I got in 2017 on Amazon for the BBS Documentary. Believe me, I'm quite sure the BBS Documentary is quite fine, but it was nice to remember how weird and unknown the project started out as.

The Appreciation For Spaces Episode: A Moment of Recognition, A Time of Containment, The Best Separation, Thanks to Sponsorship and Gifts, The Rooms I've Travelled, A Consistency of Inconsistency, A Moment For You. Perhaps a well-needed acknowledgement of the time of the moment where I have a lovely office to do my work and get things done. Thanks, by the way, to FAXZERO.COM who throw money each month so I can stream from the office without sweating rent as much.

The Industrial Spaces Episode: Hurricane Electric, Ikea Paramus, Customers and Hybrid Customers, Beach Chairs, 19-Inch Racks, Content Delivery Networks, Approaches to Space and Cost, New York Conveyor Basements, Payments in Pain. And Mangoes. A rumination on a few industrial spaces I recently spent time in, as well as a greater and perhaps too-late respect for the costs of poor environments.

The CLIVE Episode: Introduction To The CLIVE, Our High School Parents, Not Just a Salesman, Where Are They Sitting, Working With The CLIVE, Lessons and Learning, The Other End of Layoffs, Reading the Room, Thanks To The CLIVE, A Final Domain Gift. Memories and thoughts about THE CLIVE, the father of one of my high school friends, who was the best salesman I ever met.

The Voice Quality Episode: A Very Bad Idea, Public Speaking, My Thoughts on Audience, The Unspoken Guarantee, Sickness and Health, Voice and Articulation, The Roads Not Taken, Finding Your Voice. Some ruminations on my speaking voice, and qualities and issues related to it.

The Learning Process Episode: My Extreme Oscillation in Learning, Why I Learned The Way I Did, BBSes and Textfiles, Where This Worked, Fastest Temp, The Non-Threat of Failure, The Narrative, What Has Changed. A rumination on my personal learning process and where it has gotten better (or not) and why I think that it all worked out, ultimately.

The Time Bandits Episode: The Dutchess Mall, Movies 4, Suburbia Boring/Excellence, Chaotic Universe, Surpreme Being, Great Evil, Foundations, Portals of BBSes, Robbery of Textfiles, Before It's All Ruined. A short meditation on one of my favorite films, Time Bandits (1981) before a remake arrives. I have many movies that I enjoy, but this is a movie that formed a big part of my worldview when I saw it for the first time as an 11 year old.

The Constant Contact Episode: Why People Write In, Repeats, Questions, Meaning, Culture, Context, Contact, Response, Arms Open Wide. Just some thoughts on how many times I find myself brought into conversations where anyone mentions anything about materials that might need a home. It's probably impossible to filter and tune awareness of when I should be brought in, but I thought I'd try.

The Modern Medicine Episode: Feeling Unwell, Emergency Drive, Portable X-Ray, The App, The Doctors, The Information, The Sense of Well-Being In Mystery, Four Figures. A small visit to the emergency room reminds me how much more amazing medical experiences can be now, even if they cost you.

The Atari Font Episode: Atari Microcomputers, Dark Rooms, Curtains and Shades, Customizing Fonts, Creating Games, Unfulfilled Goals, Unfinished Plans, Rescue from Darkness, The Real Reason for Atari Fonts, A River of Nostalgia and Memory. Some thoughts on my love of Atari and specifically, why I thought escape came in the form of Atari Customized Fonts. If you suddenly feel you need truetype versions of Atari Fonts, here's a great selection of them: https://github.com/a8bit/EightBit-Atari-Fonts

The Nostalgic Web Episode: Ingestion Thoughts, Early Web, Something Lost, Wandering Through Memories, The Early Web, The Lost Form, Expensive and Exclusive, BBS Versus Web, Reality, Mirroring Ourselves, An Evolution. A rumination on the early Web and what that even means to me, looking back, along with the folly of trying to put myself in the mindset of the way things worked back then. As a bonus, a recognition of just how exclusive it all was. To me, the two peaks of the early web will be SUCK and CAMWORLD. You can see them (sort of) at the Wayback machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20000302182418/http://www.suck.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000905161549/http://www.camworld.com/ You probably have your own.

The Deep Image Analysis Episode: The Fun Toy, The Advancements, Apple II Crack Screens, Transcriptions, A Held Out Hand, The Dark Cloud, A Lifetime of Scanning, The Advantages, The Wishful Thinking, A Critical Thinking Requirement. Thoughts on deep image analysis, which I've been experimenting with and which has been producing amazing results, but is anything amazing anymore without concerns following soon behind?

The Hacking Museum Episode: Friends Bringing Up A Museum, What Is a Museum, What Is Hacking, How Do You Start, The Fundamentals, The Extras, Before You Hire a Staff, Hacking Stories and Lore, Mobile or Static, The Possible Real Hacking Museum. Some pals of mine were talking with me about a hacking museum, and this was something that I was supposed to write a big document about, like an assessment, but maybe a podcast episode is all it needs to be.

The Eyeball Difficulties Episode: A Ring of Light, An Emergency Ophthalmologist, Posterior Vitreous Detachment, Eyeball Tubes, an Unfortunate Curtain, Into the Laser With Remaining Eye, Pancakes, Equilibrium, Next Steps, The Things Seen, A Community of Eyeballs, A Vision for Gratefulness. This episode discusses medical conditions with an eye. If that's not your thing, then be aware that as of this writing, my eyeball is currently stabilized and find. (Skip ahead to other "Eye" episodes to see if something changed.)I've learned more about eyes in a week than a whole lifetime before that. Eyes are amazing.

The Power Wash Simulator Episode: Not Just Battle Royale, Power Wash Simulator, Plot and Intrigue, The Basic Idea, Angle of Attack, Parts Within Parts, The Urge to Clean and Make Things Better, A Messy Childhood, A Small Defined Zen Joy. Power Wash Simulator is a game/adventure where you have a power washer and everything needs cleaning. Either you're hooked or you're running away, but either way I thought I'd mention why I'm playing it to the end.

The Manuals, Manuals, Manuals! Episode: Heading Out To Deal With Manuals Plus, The Manuals Plus Saga, The Latest Part, The Digital Manuals, Aesthetic And Information, My Great Manual Sorting Screwup, Brands and Flibberjibbits, The Future Holds. Plus: The Facade of Brands. Lots of thoughts about two parallel projects: The Manuals Plus Loadout, now about to get a lovely upgrade, and the Manuals Collection at Internet Archive, which is getting an upgrade of its own.

The Cheshire Catalyst Episode: The Brightest Smile, A Long History, TAP Magazine, 2600 Magazine, HOPE Conferences, A Late Start, No Sleep, Close to the Edge, 3-2-1, Space Hobo, A Chance To Remember. Some thoughts about Cheshire Catalyst, a hacker who had a lovely history and who is gone, leaving behind memories and smiles.

The Configuration Episode: Two Configuration Aspects, The Rotating Bulletin Board System, Arcade Fidonet, Power-Switch-Rotation, What Was I Thinking, Happy Life / Lack of Strife, USENET Groups and Configuration, Works Or No Works, Cancelmoose, ROFLCon Panel, I Call Upon My Brain. I noticed I've been getting heavy the last few episodes, so here's a geek waterfall of the ups and downs of configuration, from my teens and twenties. My memories of the ROFLCon Panel: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2565

The Digital Faith Episode: Obsession and Storage, To-Dos in a Dining Room, The Path from Analog to Digital, The Fight for Perfection, The Battles and Triumphs, Chapter and Verse, Passages to The Light, Losing a Taste for Conflict, The Fan Mail. Some ruminations of how digitization is digitization and what matters is we get the bits. Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Mister Jangles Option Episode. In which your ol' pal Mister Jangles throws you a possible lifeline.

The Data Dirigibles Episode: Prehistoric TEXTFILES.COM, The Cry of the Leech, TEXTFILES.COM Comes to Pass, Downloading Archives, Downloading More Archives, Kilo Mega Giga Tera, TEXTFILES TIME CAPSULE, What Persists, The Unpretty But Surviving Clump, Slash Internetarchive, Slash Internet, Software Capsules, Ace and I Ride High An episode about my idea that the future is just massive balls of data, floating airships of content that float slowly through our virtual sky. Let's see if I'm right. Meanwhile, come browse the capsules at: https://archive.org/details/softwarecapsules Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The ScanTailor Dance Episode: A Small Project That Is Huge, The Endless Pages, Crop and Rotate, The Search for an Application, Best and Abandoned (and Best and Worst), The Experience of ScanTailor Advanced, The Missing Mentor, Before Applications, The Dance of Software Destiny. I have learned way too much about ScanTailor in a few days, and I thought I'd share how it felt before my brain tells me it's not good to revisit dark passages of memory and I forget. Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Monotony Episode: My Boring Day, The Crushing of Monotony, How I've Always Adored Repetition, Engagement and Disengagement, Long-Form Information, Temporary Domain Expert, Advice on Handling Monotony, A Web of Friends. Plus: THE ANALYTICS. Some thoughts about handling long form repetition, considering that's all I've been doing since forever and onward forever still. Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Arcade Documentary Arcade Interview Episode: Getting Down to Union Bridge, Eric and Stephanie, Zach, ARCADEDOCUMENTARY.COM, Being The Dream Interview, Always The Last, A Closing Moment. Thoughts as I do an interview for the Arcade Documentary being done by Zach Weddington, "Arcade Dreams" (also called "Arcadia" in some places), which I gave my domain to: https://arcadedocumentary.com Eric and Stephanie run SAVE POINT in Union Bridge. Here's the address: https://savepointmd.square.site/ Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Last (?) Computer Shopper Episode: Drawing The Line, Ups and Downs, My Hot Glue Enemy, Stresses and Delights, BBS List Highlights, The Ever Forever Scanning. Some last big mentions of the Computer Shopper scanning project, because otherwise this becomes a series of episodes about Computer Shopper and that's not very enjoyable for anyone. The Computer Shoppers are growing here: https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper I expect to do 2 a week. (Maybe more but it's really a tough process.) I've got a lot of support in the background, so thanks to everyone doing that. Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Video Content Episode: What Is Even On Video; Commerical Tapes, Recordings of Individuals and Events, Television, The Meaning, Loss Versus Lossless, 40-Year Delay on a Dream, The True Nature of Television, The Hope of Doing It Right. A meditation of what video content ends up being, now that I'm several thousand tapes in. Here's hoping I can do a few thousand more! Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Amusement Park Defunctland Episode: Listening to too much Defunctland, Lessons Learned from the Amusement Park Historians, The Unique Situations of Roller Coasters, The Common Threads, The Lessons and Inspirations. A bit of a love letter to Kevin Perjurer's Defunctland series, a youtube series which brings together, especially as time goes on, a really deep and rich overview of very well-researched stories of rides and amusement parks. https://www.youtube.com/@Defunctland Two that represent my favorites: Walt's Epcot: (Citizen Kane Parody of EPCOT's Story): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKYEXjMlKKQ Live From the Space Stage (Amazing Documentary on a Space Band): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0rDLvg-Lfs&t=130s Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Long Drive Hard Drive Episode: A Common E-mail, An Offer of DVDs, A 800 Mile Drive, The Wawa, Fugue State and Explainer Videos, There and Back Again, The Process. Someone offered me an attic of DVDs. I said yes. And then I drove 800 miles to get them. Here's what that's like. Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It is supported by Patreon subscribers. You can check out episodes before anyone else and help me with various bills and debts as they arise by joining up at https://patreon.com/textfiles.

The Aboveground Episode: What the Aboveground Means, The Cloak and Cosplay, The Risks Without Risks, Hacker Conferences, The Tech Industry, The Hidden Cost of Underground. Some thoughts on a concept I've been mulling about, regarding "The Aboveground", a cosplay version of being underground used by certain groups, usually for some gain, to bring the delusion of lawlessness and lack of limits, when in fact needing and depending on those limits to succeed. I also made a blog post: The Great Aboveground Empire.

The Computer Shopper Aesthetics Episode: Last Thoughts On the Project, Every Major Step, Considerations of Contrast, Size and Intimidation, Impossible Perfection, Resting Easy. One last set of consideration about all the aspects of the Computer Shopper Scanning Project before I do whatever it is I'm doing 200 times. Finished issues will be here: https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper This podcast is supported by Patreon and other sources. Supporting the podcast helps with Jason's medical debt and various bills. The Patreon is at https://patreon.com/textfiles and can get your name into the episodes.

The Atari Hotel Episode: The Atari Hotel, Bought and Bought and Bought and Bought, The Concept Drawings, The Drawn-Out Death of Atari, Livery, Hotels, Entropy, Concepts, A Breath of a Seed, The Real Atari Hotel. As of this writing, the Atari Hotels are still being advertised at https://atarihotels.com/ I took photos of my trip through the TWA hotel and the album is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/albums/72177720307661452 Photos of the sketched-out Atari Arcade concepts can be seen here: https://arcadeblogger.com/2016/02/13/atari-arcade-concept-art-a-glimpe-of-the-future/

The Tiger King Episode: Finally Watching Tiger King, Spoiler Alert, An Overview of the Three Seasons, Big Cats and Shady Deals, The Spectacle and the Madness, What Kind of Documentary, B-Roll, Too Funny to Fail. An overview of the documentary series "The Tiger King", which has three seasons (eight episodes, five episodes, three episodes) and what it feels like to me, watching it from the point of view of someone who cares about documentaries.

The Logistics Episode: The First Computer Shopper, The Hidden Logistics, The Simplest Part, Hot Glue, Orientation, Wayward Pages, Boxes and Checks, Gaming Alexandria, A Future Stack, The Logistics of Empathy. A recognition of how very little of scanning is scanning, and how hard everything but the scanning is, and how if Logistics does its job, you never once think about it. Thanks to Gaming Alexandria for being part of this project.

The Mike Berlyn Episode: Mike Berlyn, Memories of Mike, The Greatest Love Story, GET LAMP's Shaky Start, Final Approval. Plus: The Archives. On the loss of Mike Berlyn, some links: The Infocom Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXNLWy7rwH4 Mike's Interview Page for GET LAMP: http://www.getlamp.com/cast/20060225berlyn/index.html Mike and Muffy Berlyn Archive: https://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/resources/219

The TEXTFILES.COM Machine Good Times Episode: A Moment of Reflection, A Previous Moment of Darkness, The Quarter Century of Hosting, A Shifting Window, The Role TEXTFILES.COM Has Played, ARCHIVE.ORG vs. TEXTFILES.COM, a Heartfelt Thank You. Recognition of how the TEXTFILES.COM replacement machine is working so well, and an additional recognition of the context of a hosted machine existing so many years across time in one of the most shaky mediums imaginable.

The Unusual Look Back Episode: Suburban Horse, Warehouse of Broken Dreams, Pennsylvania Pinball, A Mythical Warehouse, Tomb of Arcade, Compuserve Documents, The Nature of Hope, An Infinite Relay Race. A knockaround set of thoughts about things that were only weird when I look back at them. The photos I took of the pile of vintage equipment and software before I was ejected from the facility is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/albums/72157632915159115

The Computer Shopper Episode: A Small Billing Situation, Computer Shopper's Unique Place, The Listings and the Ads, A Happy Life, The Decline and Loss, A Reminder and an Opportunity, Coming Together, Debinding, The First and the Last Scan. A little bit about the comes-out-of-nowhere Computer Shopper scanning project now underway, where I'll be digitizing thousands of pages and materials across the next months out of a multi-hundreds eBay purchase.

The Strike Manual Episode: The Mother of All Manuals. The Assignment. How Many Broom Strokes. Friends of Friends. The Honored Transcription. After-School Activities. Two Weeks Later. A Moment to Make Things Right. A tale told out of school of the best typing assignment I never completed.

The Momentary Fall And Empire of Paper Episode: A Sudden End For a Phone, Bits of Paper, The Units of Communication, Unexpected Archives, The Wonder of That Which Remains, Digitization and Gatekeeping, Glory and Wonder, A Catalyst or a Threat, The Joys of Every Day. A small reverie on the aspects of digitization and how wonderous it was that things worked out like they did in the 20th century for the digitization by the 21st. Plus: A Eulogy for the phone I've had all through this podcast, who held up very well, considering.

The Cassette Digitizer Episode: Building a Tascam 122 Mk III, The Era of Cassettes, Previous Attempts, Why Cassettes Are Important, My Audio Era Before the Video One, Where The Process Is, The Future Paths, The Joy Of The Cassette Pile. I am finally moving on to digitizing audio cassettes at high quality! Here's some of my thoughts on that. One of the main destinations will be this collection: https://archive.org/details/cassettetaperecordings

The Space Rogue Episode: A Respectful Trip, A Book Reading, The Works BBS, A Ferret in Massachusetts, Gatherings to Gatherings, The L0pht, Seedlings to Guarding, The Digital Lifeline, The Story of the L0pht and of Space Rogue, Why The Book is Needed, A Joyful Noise, A Family's Witness. My pal Space Rogue wrote a book called SPACE ROGUE: HOW THE HACKERS KNOWN AS L0PHT CHANGED THE WORLD. It talks about his time as part of that group, of the @stake era, and most importantly, his path in life. It's a great Hacker Memoir and I hope we see many more. His book site (and his personal site as well) is at https://www.spacerogue.net/wordpress/

The Endless Procrastination Episode: An Illusion of Productivity, The Oldest E-mail, an Exponential Graph. Fast vs. Slow, Easy vs. Hard. Not as Hard as it Seems, the Stress, the Process, Techniques and Cheat Codes. Two Simple Tools. Plus: Good Financial News. A rumination on my procrastination issues and what I try to do to mitigate them.

The Warm Spaces Episode: The Endless Font of the BBS Documentary, Skills Learned, Spaces Found. A Bowling Alley in Kansas. A Starring Role. Kids Hanging Out, My Very Own Rocky Horror, Plastic and Fabric and Wood. Some thoughts on how I loved being in warm spaces, and how many different rooms, including the one I stream in, try to live up to that. Jim Willing's Interview shots show his now-since-closed-and-opened and multi-owners since bowling alley: https://archive.org/details/20040128-bbs-willing

The Code Grenade Episode: A Lost Summer, A Grey Machine, Zork II, A 13 Year Old Engineer, Modules and Rooms and Graph Paper, The Grenade That Finished Me, A Testimony to Long-Lost Data. When I was very young, I tried to make an Infocom-level Adventure Game. It did not go very well at all.