Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It

The Process Episode: Expert or Expert on Time, The Rush of a New Project, Determining What Is Best, How I Find a Place, The Relationship of Time to Work, Why Do All Of This, A Relay Race or a Finish Line, The Process That I Believe In. Some thoughts on how I do things, the rules I follow, the pitfalls people fall into, what it's all for. It might not help anyone, but I hope it does, a little bit.

The 2000 New Games Episode: A Fundamental Question, A New Spin on an Old Project, The Emularity, You Have to Ask MAME, 2000 Games, Slot Machines, Secret Buttons, Mahjong, Old Favorites, The Heart and Soul of an Arcade Drive, A Magic Moment That Never Ends. Recorded on the event on adding roughly 1,800 new arcade machines to the Internet Archive, and the process that goes behind it. I mention that only about 10 people probably understand how it all happens, and while this episode doesn't increase that number, it at least lets everyone know it is happening.

The Anime Fansub Episode: Wondering How I Got Here, VHS, Mechanisms, A Sudden Offer, 700 Tapes, The Source of the Source of the Source, Asking the Experts, What is Anime Fansubs, Where We Are, My Strange Little Corner. A tale of how https://archive.org/details/fansubmarine has come to be.

The Starting Memory Episode: Messing Around With Yet Another Phone Conference, A Flash of Memory, Supermarket, Rented and Unusual Machines, A Tester, Finding A Place to Stand, The Realization and the Starting Moment. Plus: Thanks for 150 Episodes. 150 episodes are a lot. I wouldn't have imagined I'd be spending years recording these memories, so I thought I'd share one of my very first.

The Patrick O'Malley Episode: A Wind-Down of Focus, NE.JOBS, RAID Interview, 30 Days of Consultancy, Debt Repayment, Life Under Patrick O'Malley, The Key Jab, The Sardonic Hit, A Later Consultancy. More Testimonies, Less Obituaries. Pat O'Malley's Website is at http://patrickomalley.com/.

The Cancellation Episode: Psygnosis Dreams, A Ship's Tunnel, Nintendo's Limits, Lost Between the Cracks, Infocom's Game Ideas, The Other Destiny, A Lifetime of Cancellations, Our Sine Wave. Also: A Plea for a File Folder. An episode about games, ideas, and other works that never made it off the drawing board, and some level of solace that this was the case.

The Toorcamp 2009 Episode: Everyone Tried, A Dream of CCCamp and Burning Man, Quaint Toorcon, I Was In, Silica, Missile Silos, Emmanuel, Two Kinds of People, Not Allowed, My Scariest Tour, The Police, Goodbye, I Can't Attend. My memories, hazed over 10 years, of Toorcamp 2009. Dedicated to Dan Kaminsky, who attended the camp and who I enjoyed all the time I ever got with him.

The Clothes Horse Episode: A Terrible Teacher, The Boot, A Plain Chain Childhood, Cow Suits and Public Trots, The Inflection Hat, The Clothes I seek, An Outfit As Half the Introduction, The Substance, A Bad Teacher's Lesson. An overview of the fact I dress exotically, some of where that comes from, and a life lesson.

The Vintage Font: A Festival of Windows, Working Through Boxes, The Emotions and Feelings of Fonts, 3279-BIOS-Tandy, The Lineage of Vintage Fonts, Settling a Question By Asking the Source, Our Closing Window. Some musings on fonts on the occasion of downloading and using a variety of vintage fonts I've picked up online.

The Absence of Light Episode. Upon an anniversary.

The Shadow GET LAMP Episode: Talking Head Criticism, The Intention of BBS Documentary, Two Terrible GET LAMP Choices, The Choice Made, The Choice Avoided, A Delight for A Couple Dozen People, The Boundaries of Infinite Creation. Also: No More Plastic Disc Salesman. GET LAMP can be had for free at this URL: https://archive.org/details/GET_LAMP_The_Text_Adventure_Documentary

The Audio Lot Episode: A Craigslist Find, Everyone Comes Together, Eight Thousand Dollars, The Haul, The Cataloging, The Life of Mark Pines, A Future to Live Forever. An episode about a haul out of Connecticut that I got to play a minor part in, and which represents one of the reasons we all like to do this work. It'll be months before this bears fruit, but the results will be truly enjoyable.

The Morning Scans Episode: A Delight When I Wake Up, DPI and Depth, The Bad Old Days, The Best of Now, 2 millimeters, The Improvements, A Truly Infinite Task, A Mostly Wonderful Time, A Job Perk You Can Share. An appreciation for what we have, and yet another invitation to visit.

The Whimsical Episode: A Never-Found GET LAMP Feature, The Importance of Whimsy and Extra Effort, ANSI Art, A Very Loud Flap, 100 Years Ago, 100 Years from Now, Tossing Embers from a Moving Train. The 100-Year Traveler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_Soames The 100-Year Easter Egg: Trials Fusion: https://www.polygon.com/2015/6/12/8771657/report-trials-evolution-riddle-solved

The Tascam Portastudio Episode: All the Access in the World, A High School Band, Music and Sound, The Portastudio, Multitrack Recording, Control of Time, 2 Albums and Singles, A Quiet Drifting Away. Also: An Actor to Remember a Friend. The music Jeremy and I did continues to have a page with links to many of the songs we made on the Tascam: http://www.cow.net/bis/

The Summer Romance Episode: Visitation, Summer, Neighborhood, Patio, Atari, A Unicorn, Artwork, Dreams, Every Day, Dinner, A Handshake. A tale of a summer romance long ago. The absolute best book on the artwork of Atari and both the people behind it and capturing the loveliness of it all is "The Art of Atari" by Tim Lapetino. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Atari-Tim-Lapetino/dp/1524101036

The Monk and the Sherpa: 40 Years with Chris Orcutt, Our Divergent Paths, The Focus, My Carnival, The Bedrock, Tales of Long-Term Friendship, Console Games, New Eyes, A Journey. Chris has a blog at https://orcutt.net/weblog/blog/ where he posts something like 3-4 times a year. If you want to get hit with a novelette every season, this is the blog for you. Naturally, his books are all for sale: https://orcutt.net/weblog/buy-books/

The Buried Source Treasure Episode: An Ocean of Material. The Hidden Treasures. The Infocom Source Code. The As-Yet Undiscovered Dragon Hoard. The Wonder of These Offers. Drop Them Off, Run Away. Spells in a Cabinet. My historical source collection on Github: https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories The collection of game source at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/gamesourcecode

The Left Arm Episode: Medical Malady, Shakespeare in the Park, Saxophone Guy, Weird Inflatable Couch, A Minor But Not Minor Injury, Another Arm Injury, My Limits, How I Will Be Found. A rumination on my medical limits and physical changes with age.

The Bad Review Episode: Grateful and Happy, A Cascade of Good Reviews, That Single Arrow from the Crowd, Motivations for Criticism, The BBS Documentary Not Made, GET LAMP and a Thousand Choices, Empathy. Plus: Bring it On.

The Myst Episode: Rent Control, Harvard Square, An Educational Store, A Clickable Image, Lost Hours, Never at Home, An Impossible Depth, A Fake Impossible Depth, A Special Moment, Another Game I Like, Cyan's Headquarters, Craft of the Millers. Thoughts on how hard Myst hit me at the time, along with what made it so special. I mention an AI for playing text adventures made up on the spot. It's located here: https://play.aidungeon.io/main/landing It's... something to experience. Definitely try it out.

The Non-Programmer Episode: A Clear Declaration, No Programming Training, How Programmers Think, What I Think, What Filmmaking Makes You Think, Thrust Into a Programming Environment, WAFFLEIRON, We Each Have Something. Some thoughts on what a terrible programmer I am. Absolutely the worst. Hire me for nothing. Don't let me near your code, and certainly don't let me name it.

The Photon Episode: An Invitation and A Drive, A Strip Mall, A Building. Space Depot, Recruitment, Initiation, The Wonder. Black Carpet and Smoke Machines. Overbuilding For Thousands, A Short Photon Existence, No Adult Perspective, A Shadow of Photon, An Inspiring Documentary, Real Fake Guns. There's a lot of information about Photon when you know to look for it. Some good sites: http://www.lasertagmuseum.com/collections/the-curators-of-photon-photon-collection http://www.lasertagmuseum.com/indoor-laser-tag/indoor-company/n-u/photon http://futurewarstories.blogspot.com/2017/06/fws-military-sci-fi-toys-great-laser.html Vince's website for his Laser Tag/Photon documentary is here: http://www.lasertagvideo.com/

The Unending Projects Episode: Perspective On Many Projects, Believing There's No End Where There Are, Ends I've Witnessed, Ends I've Been, Lessons Learned and Projects Beyond. A rumination on the nature of large scale projects and projects without end, and how I've managed with them. Special Information Cube appearance, as well as thoughts on my other long-term messes.

The Great Cacophony of Scanning Episode: An Influx Valve, Mucking The Stables, Infinite Discords, The Cover Problem, NASA Launch and Photos On A Carpet, A Trickle Versus a Flood, The Inevitable Future, A Moment of Joy. Some thoughts on the incoming mass of material coming into the Archive right now. I mention the Pulp Magazine Archive, which is here: https://archive.org/details/pulpmagazinearchive

The Oculus Episode: An Unexpected Gift, A Long Life with VR, A Dingy Hotel Room, Features, Magic, Favorite Apps, An Unlikely Constant Place. I was handed an Oculus Quest 2. Nobody asked me to do a review, but I figured it'd be fun to do one anyway. There's actually all sorts of rules towards people saying they "just happen to have" something and then doing a review of it, so I'll just say that I wasn't going to buy one and I got one for free, and I've enjoyed it. My Oculus "Name" is BoVRine; feel free to link up if you have one of these things.

The Election Episode: Being an Election Inspector, Training for the Unusual, Poll Pads, 300 Feet, 5am, 6am, Shivering Hands, Solid Day, Meeting 675 People, Suit and Gloves, Giving an Oath, 90 Minutes of Silence, A Customer Service Job, An Unforunate Coda. The wonders of being an Election Inspector! I highly encourage people to look into working elections, in both General and Local years. It's been some of my favorite work in general.

The Flash Episode: Saving a Medium, A History of Flash, The Death Blow and the Death, Ruffle The Flash, Flashpoint, An Audio/Video Conversation. The Internet Archive now supports emulating .SWF files (Flash) that were a critical part of the web whether it should have been, or not. Dozens of new, playable animations are flying in all the time. The top level of the collection is https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash The excellent emulator of Flash is Ruffle, at http://ruffle.rs The most important Flash is Badgers. https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

The Silence Episode.

The Software Forgery Episode: Let's Do This, The First Software Forgeries, Altair 8800, Pre-Order or Vaporware, The Richard Garriott Scam, Stickers and Wiped Disks, Falling Apart, Grading and Quality, Tokens of Capital, Heading Forward, Fake Historical Promotion, Keep Going. I don't mention the name of the software, but it's Akalabeth: World of Doom. First sold in 1979 as a limited baggie software before being sold by California Pacific Computer Company, before being remixed from scratch and turned into what became Ultima. For the story of an amazing fraud, look up World Power Systems: https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/forgotten-fraud-world-power-systems-e11320aa681d

The Generosity Episode: Jason Asks About Being Generous. A Guy And His Kickstarter. The Motivations. Early Survival Pizza. Making the Leap. A Documentary As Mission. The Background Conversation. Another Thank You. A somewhat strange episode, talking about what being generous means to me. I don't know if I'm the best life coach, but another Jason asked and Jasons have to stick together, for a while at least.

The Amish Shareware Episode: The Big Leagues, The Top Shelf, Pop-Up Magazine, My Story Pitch, The Spy, Fact-Check Failure, The Missed Opportunity, Software Forgery, Never Stop Trying. A story that I thought was the best, and which had to be thought too good to be true in the fact check. (I still believe it is true). Majere's Legacy: http://www.librum.us/ - Majere (1959-2008).

The Tea Party Episode: 10,000 Year Clock, The Long Now, Disclosure, Fine Drinks and a Speech, The Low Bar, Inspiring or Cynical, Why Drive Ahead, The Knowledge We Keep, A Closing Music Shop and a Lot of Manuals. Thanks to Andre G for the idea.

The Past Future Episode: A Hospital Visit, Audio Formats, Speaking Without Knowing, Wozniak and Jobs, Exercised, Technology Designs, The Best Isn't What Wins, Factories and Factors, Cheap and Expensive. Thanks to Scotty Deepgeek Fitzgerald for the idea. (And the visit.)

The File Format Wiki Episode: An Awful Failure, A Tremendous Success, An Acknowledgement of a Poor Idea, Just Solve One Problem, Easy Not Hard, Field vs. Forest, What is a File Format Anyway, 2012 Turned Into 2013, The Forever Problem, A Format Mirror, The Great Success of Failure. Thanks to Dan Tobias for the idea of this episode. The File Formats Wiki is at https://fileformats.archiveteam.org.

The Green Room Episode: Public Speaking, Green Rooms, Quiet Before 15, School Announcer, DEFCON, Jeff Moss' Room, Webstock, XOXO, SXSW, Confrontations, A Long Overdue Hug. This episode comes from an idea by Chris Erlanson.

Curt Vendel. Curt's 2003 BBS Documentary appearance: https://archive.org/details/bbs-20030323-vendel Curt at the 2019 VCF Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlqxDgnYHWU Curt and Marty's book: https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-Vendel/dp/0985597402

The Typewriter Episode: It Was Supposed To Be Magazines, Elaine and the Boxes, Floor to Ceiling, Tytell Typewriter, Sorting and Divisions, Books and Ephemera and Golden Pallets, The Typewriter Business, Peter's Last Wishes, A Project Ahead. Also: Battery Danger and Write Me 20 Times. An episode about how a simple picking up of magazines led to two truckloads of typewriter history. Some URLs worth reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/typewriter-man/376988/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Tytell https://www.irishtimes.com/business/no-carriage-return-for-the-jurassic-typewriter-1.304472 https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/nyregion/new-yorkers-co-mr-typewriter-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/nyregion/12tytell.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/nyregion/one-fewer-place-to-unstick-a-inicky-f-key.html http://algerhiss.com/history/the-hiss-case-the-1940s/the-typewriter/forgery-by-typewriter/forging-a-typewriter/ http://afflictor.com/2012/06/11/he-could-make-an-american-typewriter-speak-145-different-tongues-from-russian-to-homeric-greek/ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/obituaries/mary-adelman-89-fixer-of-broken-typewriters-is-dead.html https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-tribute-to-peter-tytell-son-of.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/peter-v-tytell-dead.html

The Action Park Documentary Episode: A Late Thursday Night, Action Park, 10 Years Ago, 2 Years of Research, A Coffee, Interview, Pile Driver, The Bones of the Plan, The Release, My Review, Nothing in the World. The website for the Class Action Park documentary: https://www.classactionpark.com/

The Medical and Life Checkup Episode: An Accident With Repercussions, Bounce Back, Two Weeks, Open Inboxes That Never Close, What It's All Been, What Goes On, 100 Hours of Podcast, A Day Grabbed With Two Hands.r Just a little reflection on a post-accident depression and concern which I am now definitively out of.

The Mysterious 4am: Big Plans for Kansasfest, The Wrong Bar at the Wrong Time, The Mysterious History of 4am, I'm Fine. No car accident is going to stop me from recording an episode! Also, you get to hear my voice modulate differently for slides and video that don't exist. The description for "The Mysterious History of 4am" from the Kansasfest program:| International Cracker of Mystery 4AM is not just a hero, a teacher, an inspiration; they're also an indication of the heights the art of software engineering can achieve. Let's walk it all through. Jason Scott, recently voted "Least Likely to Be 4AM" but also voted "Most Likely to Work at the Internet Archive" presents historical work of 4AM, introduces the audience unaware of the scope of 4AM's work to what has gone on over the past few years, and hopes to bring the hundreds of new visitors to Virtual Kansasfest just what they have been missing.

The Inbox Cornucopia Episode: Appreciating What You Have, Two Arcades Gone, The Moment of Wonder of Incoming Archive, Spam and Vandalism, The Worlds We'll Learn Of, My Favorite Stripes, Stop by the Inbox Today. An episode about my favorite current situation, the mass of incoming materials to the Internet Archive and just enjoying the stream as it goes by. This episode also invites listeners to send me questions and ideas, which I might use for future episode subjects. It's time for the feedback loop to begin!

The Novel Episode: A Book Never Written, The Plot, A Cleaning to Make Room For The Next Things. Time to make good on my promise of "move ahead or move on", and so here's the plot of a novel I concocted when I was in my 20s that I haven't done anything with in 25 years. It's lacking a lot of details, but it feels good to share and move on. I'll have many other projects in my future to finish.

Three Extraordinary Stories Told Ordinarily: Russian Mechanic, Quake Logo Massacre, Nobody Lives Here, Tetris. Three stories about usual outcomes, presented simply. I found the photos we took of the Quake Logo, they're now here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/albums/72157714912854851 The Tetris: http://cs.brown.edu/news/2000/04/17/tetris/ - strangely, it's been done a couple times since 2000 and the articles always insist on saying it's the "first" time. MIT has also done this sort of project as well.

The Ultimate BBS List Episode: 20 Years of The BBS List, What Got Me Started, The Story Everyone Knows, The Story Less People Know, The Contraption Inside, 1982 not 1983, Philosophy of Complication, Where to Go From Here, The BBS List Forever. An episode about the BBS List collection at BBSLIST.TEXTFILES.COM and what got me going on it. I mentioned a couple other nice information sites. GOT PAPERS? Is the demoscene letter collection. It's at: https://gotpapers.scene.org/ The Sixteen Colors collection of ANSI art is here: https://16colo.rs/

The Winding Conversation Episode: Watchmaking, My Pal Chris Orcutt, Our 40 Years of Talking, A Marathon of Words, Intertwined Lives, Podcast Jason, Chris' Typewriter, 15-50-80, Advice To Turn a Final Chapter Into The Middle Of The Story. Another podcast about my friend Chris Orcutt (https://orcutt.net) and our very long, near-legendary conversations we've had forever, and what that represents and inspires.

Three Stories: Wooden Signs and Paper Plates, Naked Man, Whipped Cream and Brotherly Love. Three short tales from my life, gathered together in a val-u-pak for the joy of others.

The Extreme Pain Episode: An Argument In The Car, I Killed You, Truly Can't Get Out of Bed, Crutches, What The Pain Means, What The Pain Was, An Airport Waiting Room, The Worst Doctor Ever, The Cure, The Fallout, A Changed Person, The Results, Poverty Charges Interest, Health Insurance. An episode about the worst pain of my life. If that's a bit much for you, I understand if you wish to skip it. Spoiler: I'm much better now! And it was a long time ago! Tay Zonday's tweet, which I think about all the time: https://twitter.com/tayzonday/status/1020003667921940480

The Automatic Document Feeder Episode: Acquiring an ADF, How Flatbed Scanners Work, The Lie of Scanning, How ADF Scanners Work, Asking For Help, 35 Minutes, 339 Pages, 3 Books, The Non-Intuitive Parts, The Results, A Prayer. Also: Debinding And Its Malcontents. An episode about high-speed scanning on the acquisition of a lovely Fujitsu 7160 scanner acquired thanks to donations.

The Lost Month. A biography of Tony Cennamo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Cennamo