#cataloguing

[gerry materializes at the top of the stairs, after somehow having fallen up the stairs. he groans and then stands up, rubbing at his back.]

hey rosie.

@garchivist-the-sequel

[ LONG, PAINFUL SILENCE ]

Hello there-

[glances at the name plate]

Rosie! How are you today? I need your assistance with something.

You see, recently your institution is getting a lot of statements from employees of a certain company about mold and mushrooms…I was sent here to ask if your boss can make sure those never go public.

[The woman takes out a cigarette.]

Is it alright if I smoke her, sweetheart?

-@vennamiller

Epiperneum sp. most likely. A number of vining plants used to be under pothos, and still are marketed as such, but many have been moved into different genera. Hoping to eventually raise one to flowering since I've heard it's pretty rare to see due to them not being grown to maturity and genetics that cause gibberelin deficiency, a hormone involved in growth and flowering.

The stuff has started arriving, and most of it is stuff that needs to be catalogued, so I'm buried in boxes of stuff to catalogue on top of my usual duties.

I already got through three large boxes filled with books, plus two boxes of games and toys, 10 boxes of globes, and there are still four big boxes of books (plus whatever hasn't arrived yet, which I hear is quite a bit).

yesterday i started a personal long term activity that i like to call The Condensation Project. because i’m bringing The Cloud back down to earth. well, not quite. but what it does entail, is, prospectively, a physical archive of everything i have in every saved folder on social media (sadly you can’t print videos out, so i mean images and text) and/or screenshots.

i have long thought about the fact that all of our saved content is in fact immensely precarious. a nazi could report your account tomorrow and, because zuck’s team are nazi sympathisers, your whole archive would be just, poof, gone. social networks are ruled by cold-hearted oligarchs, all of them, technocrats who sell your data for profit. i hate the fact that all my favourite art, all my favourite memes and musings and poems and photos and songs and and and, are located on platforms owned by these tyrants, who have the ability to revoke our access to these materials at their whim.

i refuse to continue paying rent with my soul for the ability to look at artworks people haven’t posted anywhere else. so i’ve embarked on the (slow) task of cataloguing all my saved posts on instagram — there’s several thousand of them — saving them to the Compooter, pasting them into a google document, shuffling them around so that the largest possible amount of images can fit on 1 A4 page. google itself is run by the very same type of billionaire, so this is one temporary step on the road to freedom. what i’m going to do is Print Them Out.

by my estimate, it will total about 900 pages. i don’t know how much that will end up costing, but really i’m ready to sacrifice other areas of spending so i can splurge out on this. after printing, i will be cutting out every image individually, and gluing them into scrapbook(s, plural, i’ll probably go through at least 4); writing out every artist’s name next to it, copying out the instagram post’s caption too if it was exceptionally interesting.

i’m a very lazy person and a serial procrastinator so this will probably take me 5 months. after i’m done with the images, i’ll start writing out by hand the saved text-based posts that i want to preserve.

i don’t know much, but i do know one thing: the internet as we know it is going down in the next 3 years, 5ish if we’re lucky. other people can do the work of prepping for floods or droughts or other disasters, i’m preparing for the CULTURAL drought. i can deal with hunkering down in a bunker and eating beans from a can, but i can’t live without art, poetry, history. so that’s what i’m prioritising.

*Yes, I know that this is an arbitrary number and some projects require larger teams. My hands just hurt. **The whole academic publishing/funding/careers system needs an overhaul because it is directly contributing to the volume of co-authors on papers as people NEED to publish regularly*** otherwise they can't access the funding or career opportunities to actually get things done.

***Publishing is expensive, it makes sense to spread that cost across as many people as possible, especially when you're all stuck needing to publish to keep your jobs and/or funding; plus, it provides networking opportunities.