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I got kind of heartbreaking news today. Nothing all that important to many people but me, honestly, but truly inconvenient when it comes to my interests: emporis.com, for literally two decades my primary source for skyscraper data,
has folded—apparently
just three days ago. The
website itself now just defaults to a page with this message:
Emporis community platform has now been retired
Please contact our team at Emporis@CoStarGroup.com for further information.
It doesn’t matter what specific link from any time before 9/13 is used, it now defaults to this page.
What does this mean for me personally? Well, I literally have
thousands of skyscraper photos on Flickr, with both notes and captions including links to the pictured building's page on emporis.com. Every one of those links: now broken.
At the very least, I guess, I still have the data on all of those photo pages that I had gotten from emporis.com: the building's name; the year it was constructed; its height in feet; and its floor count. Moving forward, I suppose I'll have to stick to linking to Wikipedia pages for these links. The irritating part is that Wikipedia does not usually list nearly as many buildings of heights lower than around 150 meters (492 feet). I suppose it might, given enough time and people willing to add the data as Wikipedia editors.
And to be honest, when it comes to just looking up skyscrapers for a given city in ranked order by height, I have been defaulting to Wikipedia for several years now anyway. I just liked linking to Emporis from Flickr because Emporis was historically more reliably accurate with its data. And to be fair, it has been less so in more recent years, usually in terms of not being up to date when a building's official name changed.
And I have been relying on Emporis, and its previous iteration skyscrapers.com, for fully twenty years. I first discovered it while I was working a temp job on the second floor of the "Ban Roll-On Building" (
Second & Seneca—I'm now linking to SkyscraperCenter.com because this 22-story building is not tall enough to be included on the "Tallest Buildings in Seattle" Wikipedia page; maybe it will be in the future, when for all I know even this SkyscraperPage link will be broken as well). That was during the few months I worked temp jobs in 2002, between my getting laid off from the
Seattle Gay Standard in November 2001 and my getting hired at PCC in August 2002. I just checked my LiveJournal and, indeed, this was the temp job I was doing when I first opened my LiveJournal account in February 2002. I was extra hired help for a corporation taking calls for employees during open enrollment for their benefits.
Anyway, in the later weeks of that job, there was a lot of downtime, and that was when I discovered "Skyscrapers.com," and was thoroughly delighted by it. It was arguably the greatest online discovery suited to my personal interests up to that point. I can't remember when the site changed to "Emporis.com," but it was a few years later. It's been Emporis for a long time, but it functioned the same way. At least, until they started putting a lot of their more detailed building data behind a paywall, which was annoying. As much as I loved this site, I wasn't going to pay for a subscription.
Nothing lasts forever, of course, but I do feel like, at the very least, what data is available at Wikipedia will be there for a long time to come, just because of the grassroots, volunteer, donor-supported and nonprofit nature of that website, which is the internet's encyclopedia. I suspect it will remain free for a long time to come. I sure as shit hope so, anyway.
Emporis.com is just one website, but this turn of events really feels indicative of the corporatization of the internet as a whole. Twenty years ago, the internet as we currently know it was still in its infancy; it really truly exploded in pop culture maybe around 1996, which was only six years before 2002. Now, 1996 was 26 years ago. But back then, there was still a lot of hopeful talk about the "democratizing effect" of the internet. People talked the same way about the advent of social media. In both cases, they have ultimately only served to support our corporate and fascist overlords. A majority of us still don't realize that the online tools we are using aren't actually the product, but we are. Even those of us who intellectually acknowledge that—including me—don't think about it often enough while actively engaging with it.
Skyscrapers.com was an excellent example of this: so much information! All for free, all for the taking! Well. Not anymore.
To be fair, most of this data can still be found elsewhere, and in some cases more reliably. It's just that Emporis, for a good two decades, was the best aggregator of all this information, the place I could find the
most information about a given city's skyscrapers or skylines. I guess that's all over now.
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I had this month's "Watch Party" movie night, virtually with Kwanteria from Houston over Prime Video last night. 6:00 my time, 8:00 her time. I suspect it's a better time for each of us in our own spaces, so that works out well.
Last month we settled on the 1991 film
The Addams Family for September, and then its 1993 sequel
Addams Family Values for October, just in time for Halloween Month. I have always loved both of these movies; they have a dark sensibility that is truly my jam, and I really love Anjelica Huston as Morticia. I have to admit, it wasn't quite as hilarious as watching
Booksmart last month, but in
The Addams Family's defense, it came out 31 years ago and I have already seen it many times.
Speaking of which: Kwanteria was
born in 1991. She tried to tell me over chat last night, "I'm old." Ha! I was 15 when she was born. I told her she can always feel young as long as she's hanging out with me.
Maybe one day over the next few years I'll take a trip to Houston. I've never been there and there's someone there that I know. If we maintain these monthly movies indefinitely then it seems entirely within the realm of possibility. She's always very excited when these movie nights are coming up.
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In other news, I feel like I should report a bit of definitiveness that seemed to come out of my weekly "1:1" with Eric over Zoom yesterday (he always calls in from his home office). Apparently his discussions with both Darryl and Justine about getting a new role working more closely with him in pricing analytics, and shifting me to that role, have gone well. He told me yesterday he'll be writing up a proposal with a job description within the next couple of weeks, and will even have me look over it before he formally submits it.
What this means is, it's virtually a guarantee now that sometime next year, I will for the first time, after fully twenty years in this job (12 by next August), actually have a new position. It's going to be a long and gradual transition, especially as I will need to train the person taking over the position I leave, but I'm totally fine with that. This being a months-long process will give me a lot of time to get used to such a huge change, and I would prefer that anyway.
Eric made it sounds like Justine in particular was actually
excited by this idea. He even used that word: excited. I was thinking about this recently, and this sort of move is arguably overdue; I may not have any ambition, but after two decades, it makes sense to evolve my role here more than just how this position itself has a lot (which it has done a great deal). In any case, I was feeling pretty good as, more than once, Eric said things like "You're such an asset here," and indicating that others feel the same way.
And god knows, I made it clear
ages ago that I don't ever want to be a Merchandiser. Shobhit was really irritated that I didn't even try to apply for the position Eric is now in, but I know my limits and I knew it would be far too overwhelming for me. Working a position that is more like
support for his position is much more my speed. And sure, maybe one day I could wind up doing his position itself, but only by doing this step would I ever be set up to succeed were that ever actually to happen.
In any case, big changes on the horizon. Now, I do think a little bit about how Kibby did something similar a few years ago, shifting from doing the equivalent of my job in Health and Body Care for fifteen or so years and then transitioning to Category Management—and not long after that, she was gone from PCC. There are many key differences that keep me from worrying about going down the same path, however, not least of which is how wildly different it is to work with Eric than it is to work more closely with Beth in Category Management. If I thought Eric and I would not work well together, I'd be a lot more hesitant. But we've already well established that we are a good professional fit with each other.
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[posted 12:19 pm]
