— पांच हजार दो सौ साठ-तीन —
You know how people say "the internet is forever"? What about when servers get fried, for whatever reason? People act like anything that gets online is automatically there permanently, but someone has to pay for that content to get hosted in perpetuity, do they not?
Granted, plenty of stuff has been there, and easily retrievable, for decades. My LiveJournal blog, which to this day I reference regularly as archives, is twenty years old this year. There were multiple pushes, back I the day, for taking advantages of services that would print your blog out into bound volumes, because of just this kind of fear. I purchased my own domain and shifted all my blogging to Squarespace in 2017 because I was no longer comfortable with Russian ownership of LiveJournal (it wasn't Russian when it first started; it was initially created in 1999 by an American programmer). Even now, there is that tiny fear in the back of my mind: if LiveJournal ever goes tits up and I lose 15 years of content, what then? In terms of my memory capacity, it will be like 15 years of history is wiped out.
For now, though, everything remains on live web pages—even my Tripod.com account, my precursor to LiveJournal, which I started back in the late nineties. My LiveJournal even has a live link to it that still works. This very blog does as well, in the links at the top of the page.
I started my Flickr account in 2005, so that account is now 17 years old. I've got over 69,000 photos and video clips uploaded to it. In this case, though, there is some comfort in all those files existing in their original form on my external hard drive at home. The vast amount of caption information, much of which is actually not duplicated on my blogs, are not on the original files, though. If I were rich I would hire someone to add them all to the original files, which is something that can be done. It's just not nearly as easy as writing the captions online.
I do wonder how long all this stuff really will last. If the grid ever goes down, in some climate related disaster or whatever, all that content will just disappear. Hopefully that happens after I die, at which point I won't be around to give a shit anymore.
Why am I thinking about this, anyway? I'm not even sure. Maybe because I have been combing through Flickr archives for photos and videos of my brother, Christopher, in preparation for creating a 50th birthday tribute video. I'm pretty happy with what I've curated so far, actually. I have a lot of great video content from 1992, 1994, 1995, 1997-2001, and 2004. Video pickings are slim thereafter, with only brief video clips from 2010, 2020 and 2022; there is a great video of him in a father-daughter dance with Nikki at her and TJ's wedding in 2014. All the other years, though, I'll have to rely on still photos and audio clips. At least I have plenty of "talk tape" audio content from between 1990 and 1998. Luckily I have a "Best of" collection from 1995 covering the years between 1990 and 1994 that I can focus on, which will save me a lot of time.
— पांच हजार दो सौ साठ-तीन —
— पांच हजार दो सौ साठ-तीन —
Last night Shobhit and I watched the final two, out of a total of eight, episodes of
A League of Their Own on Prime Video. I thought the show was pretty good throughout, but was rather impressed by how well they stuck the landing in the end, which totally made me cry. Both the casting and content were inclusive in a way the 1992 movie on which it's based was not, which helps close the gap in terms of the fact that the film is still better—but the show easily justifies itself. Even though the way the characters all speak is wildly anachronistic, all these women in 1943 talking as though it's 2022. Lots of period pieces do that, though, so it's fine. I was thoroughly entertained by it, and once I had seen the whole season, found that it very much exceeded expectations. I really recommend it.
And then, when Shobhit showed me the headline indicating that today Biden would be announcing the forgiveness of $10,000 in student load debt (which
did happen, predictably immediately sparking
stupid opposition), we FaceTimed Danielle to talk to her about it. I wasn't even thinking about it but since Danielle makes less than $125,000 a year and has more than $10,000 in pending student loan debt, she will qualify for it. Shobhit talked about how conservatives will fight to cancel this plan in Congress, so anyone who really wants this plan to stay in place needs to vote in November, and keep Democrats in the majority.
We wound up chatting with her for probably the better part of an hour, having a lot to catch up on. I haven't seen her since my Birth Week in early May, which Shobhit was not present for; we think it may have been since last year that he last saw her. We finally made a plan to get together sometime over Labor Day weekend. Her friend Jeanna will be around, so we'll either get together with both of them on Saturday that weekend, or with just Danielle Sunday after Jeanna flies back home.
Otherwise, we got some pretty big news, such as the fact that she's casually seeing not just one, but two guys right now. Damn! Danielle's getting some. We were actually thrilled for her.
— पांच हजार दो सौ साठ-तीन —
[posted 12:17 pm]
