Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It

The Mark Pines Auction II Episode: Mark Pines, The Second Surprise Auction, The Life of a Reseller, Bidding from Korea, The Contents of the Second Set, An Unexpected Subset, More Mark to Come. About the previously unknown second set of Mark Pines materials that was bid on, and what it means for the Mark Pines collection. https://archive.org/details/markpines?sort=-publicdate always has the new Mar...

The Stacks of Catalogs Episode: A New Round of Sorting Catalogs, The Miracle of the Catalog, Desktop Publishing, Forgotten Labor, The Rise of the Instant Change, The Guided and Adored Catalog Scanning, Treasure. Another rumination in just how much I love old catalogs, on the occasion of sorting the 40,000+ catalogs collection at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/catalogs

The DMZ Episode: Visiting the DMZ in Korea, A Bus Ride With a Passport Count, Burgers, Grenades, Bridge, Mines, Observation, Denial of Visitation, A Very Deep Tunnel, The Spectacle and the History. Plus: Not Forgetting. Some notes while visiting a war zone, albeit one with a relatively small amount of action by the day.

The Medical Tourism Episode: Signing Up for a Medical Vacation, The Hospital, A Robe and a Keycard, Dozens of Rooms, Minutes and Seconds, Expertise and Experience, A Room of Sleeping People, The Shutoff Switch, The Results, The Chance at One Person Convinced. How I went to South Korea and did a little medical tourism. I don't think there's anything to offend or bother the squeamish in it, but I di...

Before getting on a plane, I sometimes wonder if I'm leaving the ground with my life in order. Let's find out.

The Aadam Jacobs Episode: A Six Hour Round Trip, A Documentary, Aadam Jacobs, Collections and Curation, Professional Recordings, Melomaniac, A Special Power Outlet, Club Owners and Bands, The Internet Archive Collection, The Live Music Archive, The Results of a Life, No Crash. About Mellomaniac, a documentary featuring Aadam Jacobs. The documentary is actually available online: https://vimeo.com/8...

The Pile of Badges Episode: A Soft Crash, Gathering, Badges of All Sorts of Shapes and Materials, Attending Conferences, A Late Start, Some Early Predecessors, Keeping the Badges and Keys, Looking Down the Range of Forever, A Mass of Moments, A Life Lived. Contemplating my many dozens, possibly hundreds, of conference badges now hanging on my wall.

The Scarecrow Video Episode: Visiting Seattle, Walking into Scarecrow Video, My Own Mind, The Shelves, The Subjects, The Uniqueness, A Short History, The Scarecrow Video of Internet Archive, Bang, Disgust-o-Meter, Harvard Square Basements, Textfiles and Materials, The Inevitable Jumble. My experience visiting Seattle's legendary Scarecrow video: https://scarecrowvideo.org/

The Halo Championship Episode: Heading to the Championship, Missing Out, The Layout of the Championship, Missing Out Again, Not Missing Out, Lineups, AARP, Competition, Amazing Staff, The Results, Shotgun. Some experiences from when Kyle and I went to the Halo Championship to finally compete against people half our age and surprising things that happened. Well, perhaps not that surprising.

The Final March of the Floppies Episode: A Visit with John Morris, The Applesauce, The Imaging of Floppies, An Office Becomes a Battlefield, The Forever Trickle, Images and Analytics, The Final Boss of the Floppies. A celebration of what may turn out to be one of the most definite major projects in the big-office era of my work - taking down the thousands of floppy disks people have sent me over t...

The Mirrorball Episode: A Very Intense Machine, The Birth of Mirrorball, What Mirrors Are, Online Culture, Demoscene, The Ebb and Flow of Interest, A Lifetime of Mirrors, The Harvesters of Data, The Mantle of Honor, A Lottery Win, Holding To The Future. A little bit about the Mirrorball, at http://mirrorball.textfiles.com . No particular indication in the episode, but wow! 350 Episodes!

The Excessive Air Filtration Episode: Why Am I Like This, Air Filtration, The Old and the Plastic, Environments, Buying an Air Filter, Going Hardcore, Features and Facts, Health and Home, 50 Degrees, A Soon Forgotten Appliance. About the excessive air filter I got for the office. This is not an endorsement or a paid promotion - it's just a ridiculous thing to have gotten and having to turn it down...

The Upstairs Downstairs Episode: Watching Gosford Park, The Simplicity, Upstairs Downstairs, Process, Exactitude, Logistics, The Archive's Stacks, Users, Servitude, Class, A Pleasant Movie Theater. A rumination on finally seeing Gosford Park (2001) and being fascinated at the arrangement of the kitchen, and, reaching out a bit, comparing it to the arrangements of the Archive.

The Sorting Stacks Episode: Light After Shadow, Facing Down The Stacks, The Nature of Chaos, Order From Chaos, A Lifetime of Sorting, Millions of Choices, Oddity And Insanity, The Joy Of 50 Percent, Amy. With the settlement of Internet Archive's last major public lawsuit, a chance to burst out into the fields of Valhalla and appreciate the great stuff I get to do with an incalculable island of dat...

The Video Files Episode: Hard Drives Locked, Thousands of Hours of Video, Television, Audio Versus Video, The Missing Dates, The Usefulness of Video, The Sheer Disk Space, The Future of Analytics, The Unknown. About how the thousands of hours, soon to become tens of thousands of hours, of television will find a home at the Internet Archive and maybe, with some luck, the future.

The HOPE Seminar Episode: Attending Hackers on Planet Earth, A HOPE Workshop Building, Presenting a Class, The Process of Interviews, The Goals, The Process, How I Apparently Teach, Thoughts of Preparations Beyond, A Different Kind of Hope. I decided to do a workshop/class on interviewing at the HOPE Conference in NYC this year. I've not taught a class before in any way - now I know what kind of t...

The Decay and Entropy Episode: A General Store, A Long Bike Ride, The Accident, The Changes in the Neighborhood, Decay, Buildings, Malls, Arcade, Personal Times, Formation of Memories, The End of it All. A rumination on a general store that once operated at my childhood home for over 100 years before it came to an end, and what that trend means generally.

The Yard of Hard Drives Episode: Throwing Hands with Backlogs, The Literal Yard, Drives Cast Out, The Grind of Pain, Survivorship Bias, The Success and the Failure, The Arcane Nature of Repair, The Realization of Entropy, The River Styx. I find myself staring down many, many hard drives left in the yard, and try to find value and rescue in what I can get. It's going fine! But it's noisy.

The Game Company Employment Episode: That Time I Worked for Psygnosis, The US Outpost, Temp Job, The Small and Tiny Firm, Deliveries and 800 Numbers, What People Did, The Temptations of Valor, The Wonders That Were Real, An Expanse of Time, The Dreams Yet To Live. A small rumination of my time working for Psygnosis putting some realistic boundaries on what I did while I was there, in reference to...

The Sinistar at Extremes Episode: Synamax and Sinistar, Source Code, Experiments, Sinistar Research, Sinistar Upgrade, California Extreme, A Panel of Legends, An Excellent Evening, Drinks and Chats, The True Meaning, Our Vanishing Opportunity. To watch Synamax's excellent documentary on Sinistar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCuoUSDBVac

The Seagull Painting Episode: A Very Large Painting, a Suburban Life, a Gargantuan Campus, Divorce and Time, Aunts and Couches, Smaller Than I Remember, The Painting for Money, Customers, An Office Wall, a Regret of No Better Memory. An episode about a very large painting that lives in my office, and the story (and life) behind it.

The Audio Engineering Lessons Episode: Bovine Ignition Systems, They Might Be Giants, Mixing, Equipment, Future Plans, Why Audio Engineering, Going to Class, Learning the Lessons, A Part of the Chain, Lessons Learned, Jason and Jeremy Forever. The lessons learned one summer for audio engineering in a college course that still helped Jeremy and Jason even when they stopped making music (together).

The Book Release Episode: A Moment of Pride, Chris and Alexas Orcutt, The Books of Chris Orcutt, The Nine-Book Series, To Hold In One's Hands, Luck and Opportunity, The Years to Come. ...in which, like some sort of errant fellow at a ceremony, I raise a toast to Chris Orcutt getting review copies of his first book of his new series out. He's at https://orcutt.net/weblog/ and worth every amount of...

The Catalogs of False Promise Episode: The Meanings of Catalogs, The Promises, The Possibilities, Assistants and Artists, Apps, Crashed TestFlight, Computer Stores, Collections, Walking Among the Stacks, Lost Players, Lost Makers, The Guideposts to What Was. A rumination on computer software catalogs and what they might be, what they matter for, and what might happen.

The Regretted Moment of Decision Episode: Bootleg, The Bootlegger, Stone Cold Hustler, House Flipping 1970s Style, Crank, Apple II Basement, Grey Market, Lost Floppies, Decisions Made, No Regrets. I've mentioned Bootleg before, but it's time once again to talk about the uniqueness of him and an unexpected life lesson he provided me in his basement.