bad decisions inc.

Digital preservation is the only process that can and will preserve everything you love that (currently) only exists in the digital realm. It’s not 100% guaranteed to work, but let’s be real—your own painstakingly, personally, manually cultivated digital archive is all you’ll have left of the images, blogs, recipes, videos, fics, fanzines, games, servers, forums, articles, peer-reviewed scientific studies, “illegal” musicals and even the friends you found online, when the internet is completely gone.

And yes, you can trust me on this, because I've had to help family friends create a personal digital archive of their own. She chose to pay for archiving software in the end, but that's not important.

The basics of/anticipating potential roadblocks to adequate digital preservation:

What to expect from the quality of your digital archive in the future:

Also! Fun fact: you can download the files that make up your entire tumblr blog!

Any additional resources you have or know of would be greatly appreciated, so please don't hesitate to share them.

The stories you hear of people dying from rationing, this is what happens to their body.

Affordable insulin isn’t just a right, it’s a necessity.

Recipient of a third-degree burn in front of witnesses. IE, "I won't take that shit from a man dressed like a ghostbuster"= "Gostbuster" or "Buster"

A distinctive personal feature or quirk. IE, "Have you noticed how that new guy is always eating bell peppers?" = "Peppers", or "That chick has a massive forehead" = "Forehead".

An embarrassing thing you said or did. IE, "Did you seriously call Dale "Dad"?" = "Junior", "Baby boy", "Sport"

A game of name-mutation telephone. IE, "Donny Clyde" = "Bonnie 'n' Clyde" = "Bonnie" = "Bon-bon".

Irony. IE, calling a tall person "short stack" or a particularly dour person "sunshine".

A 'wrong place wrong time' one-off incident. IE, "He spilled oil on his pants and had to borrow a pair that were way too big and Jim saw him with the waistband pulled up to his nipples and called him 'Parachute'"

A batman-style origin story but not in a cool way: "One time she hit a deer with the company car and when she called the boss to tell her she was crying so hard we thought she was dying" = "Bambi"

The incredibly rare 'admiration' nickname, bourne only once a millennia under the light of the blood moon: "We saw him lift a truck once so now we call him 'iron man'"

+ How Nicknames Stick:

Your fate is determined by The Counsel

You hate it

2. Realize you forgot to smell the candle beforehand to see if you'll like it

3. Bring lit candle directly to your nose to smell it

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.