pile of good things

Want by Joan Larkin

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )

Textpost by "tapir worf" @‌eggy_egregore, that reads:

If you don't go outside every single day during the day and look at the sky, you are performing a punishing biological experiment on yourself previously reserves for prisoners

End ID.]

Also, previous tag:

fun fact this is a big issue that museums/archives/preservation professionals run into

This is something I bring up a lot. Digital preservation is not a thing to rely on. Anything digital is inherently ephemeral, fleeting.

All current and former digital storage will eventually fail. Paper tapes and punch cards cards wear and rot. Magnetic tape and disks grow mold and shed their magnetic coating. Hard drives seize and crash, their controllers fail. Optical media scratches, rots, or simply fades. Solid state media loses its charge over time. Cloud services shut down with no warning.

Long-term digital storage is a never-ending process of copying to new media.

And then there's the problem of format.

It took less than 30 years for digital works by Andy Worhol — one of the most popular artists of the 20th century — to be lost to obsolete technology.

We had the disks, we had the computers, we had modern emulators for the computers. But reading the images (PDF Archive) required very specific combinations of operating system and software versions, and in some cases required reverse-engineering image formats for which the correct combination of software could not be found.

This wasn't some obscure machine. Millions of Amiga computers were sold, and Amiga users are among the most dedicated to keeping the platform going long after its discontinuation.

And still the image format had to be reverse-engineered to recover Worhol's images.

How much of our culture from the past 30 years has been entirely digital?

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.